[issue1565525] tracebacks eat up memory by holding references to locals and globals when they are not wanted

[STINNER Victor]

STINNER Victor added the comment:

I tried to implement the feature as a new traceback.clear_frames() method. I tried to follow the chain of frame objects (using frame.f_back), but it does not work as expected. The method needs to follow the chain of traceback objects (tb.tb_next). So it makes sense to define a function instead of a method (a method usually only affect the object, not a chain of objects).

clear-tb-frames-2.txt:

- I didn't see the "tb" abbreviation in other places in Python, except for traceback attributes. I prefer clear_traceback_frames(). The name clear_frames() is maybe better because traceback is already known by the context (the module is called "tracback". Example: traceback.clear_frames(tb) instead of traceback.clear_traceback_frames(tb).

- The documentation is wrong: frame.clear() does not guarantee to clear *all* locals, but only *most* locals:

"F.clear(): clear most references held by the frame");

So I suggest a more permissive documentation:

"Clear most reference held by frames."

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue1565525>
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