[Python-Dev] Memory leak tracking

[Greg Stein]

On Wed, Jul 12, 2000 at 01:05:52AM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>...
> I suspect this is exactly what's happening.  I'd have to spend more
> time to know exactly what's happening, but this jives with the
> observed behavior.  If so, the only thing we could do is try to break
> the cycles manually at shutdown time and have the normal decrefs free
> all the memory.
> 
> I'm not sure it's worth the effort.  1) it isn't much memory; 2) it
> only leaks when gc is disabled; 3) it's a one time cost, not
> e.g. a leak every time you spawn a thread.
> 
> That last is interesting, because I believe at least on Solaris, there
> /is/ a leak for each new thread, but I haven't had time to find it
> yet.  That one's worth tracking down.  For the others, it's actually
> quite nice to see gc doing it's job!
> 
> Other than that, running the test suite, the current CVS seems to have
> a very clean bill of health memory usage-wise.

Please try to consider the embedded case, too. If Python interpreters are
created/destroyed, or modules are loaded/thrown out, or whatever... are
there leaks? Any leak can be a disaster in embedded cases.

Now... no need to be defensive :-) ... just pointing out there is another
consideration when thinking about leaks.

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/