On Dec 26, 2005, at 11:07 AM, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
I was just shoked today when I noticed this:
------------------- import sys
class A(object): y = None def x(self): pass def __del__(self): print 'deleted'
a = A() print sys.getrefcount(a) if 1: a.y = a.x print sys.getrefcount(a) del a -------------------
I understood the cross references memleaks well, like "x.y = y; y.x= x; del x,y", but I didn't imagine that "a.y = a.x" would be enough to generate a memleak. "a.y = a.x" isn't referencing another structure, it's referencing itself only. Infact if I do this the memleak goes away!!
Objects that use __del__ don't participate in cyclic garbage collection. You really want to write code that doesn't need it, or that uses weakref callbacks instead of __del__. -bob