[Moin-user] MemoryLeak bug

[Thomas Waldmann]

> But, contrary to what that bug page says, it is _not_ fixed with Moin 
> 1.5.2 and Python 2.3.5 (Linux SuSE SLES9, i386, kernel 2.6.9-7.244, 
> glibc 2.3.3). Only with Python 2.4.2 the problem seems to be gone.

Well, due to some problems where Python 2.4.2 behaved different than 
older versions, we upgraded to moinmoin site wiki farm to 2.4.2 quite 
some time ago.

> In my experiments, with both Python 2.3.3 (native SLES9) and 2.3.5, the 
> memory usuage of moin with the profile script increased linearly to 
>  >160MB at 5000 retrievals, which was when I stopped the script.

5000 retrievals of what? Many different pages or same page?

> With Python 2.4.2, on the contrary, the memory usage is constant right 
> from the start and stays around 12MB.

That is quite low. Sure it worked correctly? :)

If yes, feel lucky. Our wiki farm is often in some-hundreds-mb range. 
With Py 2.4.2.

The problem is that memory usage can have different reasons:
  * internal caching of moin
  * leaks

The problem is that I haven't found any great way yet to debug such stuff.

> I guess it's fine to use 2.4, but there are a lot of distributions out 
> there shipping 2.3, and perhaps people should be warned about this.

Well, newer versions of python usually fix bugs of older versions.
Same is true for MoinMoin.

This is why we recommend the latest release of both.

Some distributors additionally manage it to distribute broken python 
packages (or old moin packages).

So in many cases, just doing a /usr/local install of both is much less 
trouble than having broken packages with old bugs.