[IronPython] IronPython is leaking

Szymon Kobalczyk s.kobalczyk at softwaremind.pl
Wed Dec 21 23:29:52 CET 2005


Martin Maly wrote:

>This is a known problem in IronPython. The code generated using Evaluate is currently not generated as garbage-collectable code. This is a something that we have yet to fix. In the meantime what might help is pre-compiling the code and then execute/eval the code already compiled.
>
>Martin
>
>  
>
Actually for Evaluate not all is lost. You can set the 
IronPython.AST.Options.FastEval which causes IronPython to simply 
interpret the code rather then generate IL and run it. But for other 
cases the only way to limit allocations is to precompile all the scripts 
and reuse them for further execution. I started similar thread last 
month and here is suggested workaround:

                        FrameCode code = Builtin.compile(script, 
"<string>", "exec") as FrameCode;
                       PythonModule eval = new PythonModule("<eval>", 
new Dictionary<object, object>());
                        code.Run(new Frame(eval));

[This is to the IP team]
Actually this reminded me of something: In last version You made a 
change that the first line doesn't return FrameCode but some other 
object (FunctionCall if I remember correct) that doesn't expose any 
methods to execute it. Can you fix it or provide some other alternative 
to produce something executable from script?
[/end]

Another reason you see IronPython allocating resources is that it builds 
internal "metadata" for all assemblies it encounters. In my case this 
consumes about 2MB (but this is allocated on first call only) and you 
can verify this quickly with CLR Profiller. It also takes some time so 
you might want to do this early on application startup instead on first 
call (e.g. during some GUI action).

One more issue you might watch for is that if you pass some variables to 
PythonEngine, the references these objects can be held by IronPython 
even after finishing executing the script. For this I had to actually 
add ClearVariables method on the Engine.

However, IronPython is so much valuable tool for us that we try to deal 
with these pitfalls and use it in production system with great success. 
So once again many thanks to the whole team.

Szymon Kobalczyk.




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