On Jan 27, 2008 3:37 PM, Christian Heimes <lists@cheimes.de> wrote:
Phillip J. Eby wrote:
Expose an API to clear the cache, and clear it at shutdown? It should probably be part of interpreter shutdown anyway.
Good point. I've implemented PyType_ClearCache and exposed it via sys._cleartypecache(). The function is called during finalization, too.
I'm not sure we should expose an API to clear the cache, but I don't have strong opinions either way. If we keep the ability to clear the cache, should we also consider some control over the int/float freelist? These are worse than the tuple/frame free lists since int/floats are unbounded. I suspect the method free lists in Objects/methodobject.c and Objects/classobject.c don't have that many entries that could be removed. There may not be a lot we can do for the int/float caches and I'm not sure if it's worth it. We can't move objects once created, although we could scan the blocks and if there are no live objects in a block, free it. That would presumably help with this case: list(range(some_big_number)) I don't know how important these things are in practice.
Can somebody please double check the change? The results are promising and I'm sure I've implemented it correctly but you never know ;)
The biggest problem I have with the patch is the attribute name. I would prefer underscores. ie _clear_type_cache instead of _cleartypecache. Attributes in sys are currently inconsistent, but it seems that most of the newer names have underscores. (Aside: if we are going to move attrs out of sys for py3k, we should consider renaming them to be consistent too. Regardless of moving them, should we rename them.) n