Hi Matthew,
Your post in c.l.py about your re rewrite didn't mention where to report
bugs etc so I dug this address out of Google Groups ...
Environment: Python 2.6.2, Windows XP SP3, your latest (29 July) regex
from the Python bugtracker.
Problem is repeated calls of e.g. compiled_pattern.search(some_text) --
Task Manager performance panel shows increasing memory usage with regex
but not with re. It appears to be cumulative i.e. changing to another
pattern or text doesn't release memory.
Example:
8<-- regex_timer.py
import sys
import time
if sys.platform == 'win32':
timer = time.clock
else:
timer = time.time
module = __import__(sys.argv[1])
count = int(sys.argv[2])
pattern = sys.argv[3]
expected = sys.argv[4]
text = 80 * '~' + 'qwerty'
rx = module.compile(pattern)
t0 = timer()
for i in xrange(count):
assert rx.search(text).group(0) == expected
t1 = timer()
print "%d iterations in %.6f seconds" % (count, t1 - t0)
8<---
Here are the results of running this (plus observed difference between
peak memory usage and base memory usage):
dos-prompt>\python26\python regex_timer.py regex 1000000 "~" "~"
1000000 iterations in 3.811500 seconds [60 Mb]
dos-prompt>\python26\python regex_timer.py regex 2000000 "~" "~"
2000000 iterations in 7.581335 seconds [128 Mb]
dos-prompt>\python26\python regex_timer.py re 2000000 "~" "~"
2000000 iterations in 2.549738 seconds [3 Mb]
This happens on a variety of patterns: "w", "wert", "[a-z]+", "[a-z]+t",
...
Thanks for that, John. I've should've kept an eye on the Task Manager!
:-) Now fixed.
It's surprising how much time and effort is needed just to manage the
memory!
MRAB