On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 08:40:37AM -0500, R. David Murray wrote:
I think you want to take a look at PEP 3134. And then please file a doc bug to have someone update the documentation of sys.exc_info, since the advice in the warning box is no longer valid in Python 3.
Thanks for the pointer, I understand the cause now. I had read the warning in the description of sys.exc_info, but I hadn't realised that Python was (now) implicitly saving the traceback for me. I was able to solve this memory leak by explicitly clearing __traceback__: except E: # get exception value in a python2/3 portable way a = sys.exc_info()[1] a.__traceback__ = None I have added a doc bug issue for this: http://bugs.python.org/issue7340 Greg Hewgill http://hewgill.com