[ python-Bugs-1376775 ] Memory leak in the email package

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Tue Dec 20 17:44:04 CET 2005


Bugs item #1376775, was opened at 2005-12-09 02:03
Message generated for change (Settings changed) made by effbot
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Category: Python Library
Group: Python 2.4
>Status: Closed
>Resolution: Invalid
Priority: 5
Submitted By: ken668 (ken668)
Assigned to: Barry A. Warsaw (bwarsaw)
Summary: Memory leak in the email package

Initial Comment:
memory leak in email.message_from_string. This is what
I did to create a leak.

You used the attached file, memleak.eml.

f = open("memleak.eml")
buffer = f.read()
f.close()

# now buffer has the email string
msg = email.message_from_string(buffer)
msg = None # this should free the memory but it doesn't

# The memory that is used in msg is not completely free


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>Comment By: Fredrik Lundh (effbot)
Date: 2005-12-20 17:44

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This is not a leak (a leak means that the process will
grow if you *repeat* the operation, not that things are
unexpectedly left in the object memory).

And it's not a bug, either; the "copy" of the message
that's returned by get_objects() is the contents of the
buffer variable in the test program.

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Comment By: ken668 (ken668)
Date: 2005-12-15 07:44

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Yes, it is a bug. My mistake was when I gave the details, I
should have mentioned gc.get_objects(), not gc.garbage.
gc.get_objects() showed the leaks not gc.garbage.

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Comment By: Neal Norwitz (nnorwitz)
Date: 2005-12-15 06:56

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Do you still believe there is a problem or can this report
be closed?

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Comment By: ken668 (ken668)
Date: 2005-12-12 17:00

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My mistake. I had also called gc.get_objects() too. It was
gc.get_objects() that outputed the content of the email
message. It was not gc.garbage. Sorry about that.

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Comment By: ken668 (ken668)
Date: 2005-12-12 16:59

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My mistake. I had also called gc.get_objects() too. It was
gc.get_objects() that outputed the content of the email
message. It was not gc.garbage. Sorry about that.

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Comment By: ken668 (ken668)
Date: 2005-12-12 16:53

Message:
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I added these three lines after the line "msg=None"

import gc
print "gc.collect()\n\n", gc.collect()
print "gc.garbage\n\n", gc.garbage

If you pipe the output of gc.garbage to a file, you will see
the email message you just sent are still be in the memory.

Everytime I call email.message_from_string, a copy of the
message will be kept in the memory even after I set the
returned value to None.

I tried the same thing with email package email-2.5.tar.gz,
that memory was freed right after I set the variable "msg"
to None.

Thanks

Ken



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Comment By: Neal Norwitz (nnorwitz)
Date: 2005-12-11 21:13

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What causes you to believe this is a memory leak?  I ran
this under valgrind and it doesn't report any leaks.

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