[Python-Dev] Re: [Zope.Com Geeks] Re: Program very slow to finish

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "TP" == Tim Peters <tim.one@home.com> writes:

    TP> Roeland found the creation time per dict element on his Linux
    TP> system was pretty steady, but destruction time per element
    TP> grew disturbingly with dict size.  I found the same on
    TP> Win98SE, but the degeneration in destruction time per element
    TP> was milder than on his Linux test.

Very interesting!  I think I've noticed the same thing with some
Pipermail (Mailman's archiver) work I've been doing.  When doing a
from-scratch re-generation of the archives of say, python-list
(280+MB), it creates some really big dicts, and when it goes to free
them (apparently in gc), the disk just gets hammered.  Relatively
little CPU is being used (it's like 80-90% idle), but the machine is
almost unresponsive.  This on a 2.4.2 kernel with 256MB.

I'll try building a 2.2 with pymalloc and see what happens.

-Barry