Ref counting fun (was: Re: [Python-Dev] CALL_ATTR patch)

[Michael Hudson]

On Thursday, Aug 7, 2003, at 14:08 Europe/London, Michael Hudson wrote:

>> Since Zope has worse leak problems than
>> Python, Zope testing has more tools to dig into it:
>>
>>     http://cvs.zope.org/Zope3/test.py
>>
>> That's the Zope3 unittest test driver.  The TrackRefs class is a handy
>> little beast, which uses a debug build's sys.getobjects() to keep 
>> track of
>> how many objects of each *type* exist across test runs, and how many
>> refcounts total they account for.  After the first few iterations, 
>> TrackRefs
>> doesn't itself distort the results it prints.  It will tell you the 
>> types of
>> the objects that are leaking, and also whether objects are actually 
>> leaking,
>> or that merely refcounts to existing objects are leaking (e.g., a 
>> common
>> kind of "leak" is to forget to decref Py_None, but memory doesn't 
>> actually
>> grow then).

[I'll observe that trying to wrap running a test in a refcount neutral 
way is entertaining...]

> Cool!  I'd blundered my way to something like an ad hoc version of
> this, next time I'll use something that someone's actually thought
> about :-)

OK, so I've now blundered my way to the attached, which when run 
produces this:

ints seems to leak 1 references...
<type 'long'>                                                  1        
4
multi seems to leak 9 references...
<type 'tuple'>                                                 1        
5
<type 'classobj'>                                              1        
4
<type 'dict'>                                                  1        
4
<type 'int'>                                                   1        
3
<type 'str'>                                                   0        
4
<type 'NoneType'>                                              0        
1
slots seems to leak 10 references...
<type 'tuple'>                                                 5       
20
<type 'type'>                                                  0        
5
errors seems to leak 9 references...
<type 'tuple'>                                                 4       
16
<type 'type'>                                                  0        
5
subtype_resurrection seems to leak 2 references...

(the names are all names of functions in test_descr).

I might have a look at these over the next few days (and also might 
ponder other bits of the test suite).

Cheers,
mwh

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