[Python-Dev] Re: Python-Dev Digest, Vol 15, Issue 46

[Evan Jones]

On Oct 19, 2004, at 9:44, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> I knew this discussion sounded familiar. . .
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-June/045403.html
> (and assorted replies)

Great! Thank you for the reference, this discussion is useful. Why is 
it that it is so hard to find stuff in mailing list archives? I spent 
about 5 hours poking around Google and manually browsing the archives, 
and didn't see that thread.

> I'm not saying I *like* the unbounded lists. . . but there's a reason 
> they're still like that (i.e. getting the memory usage down tends to 
> take some of Python's speed with it - and there isn't exactly a lot of 
> that to be spared!).

Of course, and this has to be carefully considered and carefully 
benchmarked as well. I don't think that a bounded free list approach is 
the answer, as it can be shown that any arbitrary, fixed limit is bad 
is some situations.

Basically, I'm talking about including some cache management into 
Python. My idea is to add some instrumentation that monitors the size 
of the free lists over time. If the free lists are much larger than 
what is being used, go and free some of them. This will allow Python's 
memory usage to dynamically adjust to the workload, and should limit 
the overhead.

There are two challenges to this idea:

1. How can we run such an occasional task? It should be called 
regularly, if Python is actively executing or not, just like a garbage 
collector thread would be. I don't think making this collection part of 
the normal call to allocate/free objects is a good idea, because that 
would add some expensive overhead in what needs to be a fast path for 
Python.

2. Can this be done with minimal overhead? The instrumentation needs to 
have near zero overhead, and the collection task needs to have small 
overhead.

I haven't thought this out completely, but it seems to me that 
something better should be possible.

Evan Jones

--
Evan Jones: http://evanjones.ca/
"Computers are useless. They can only give answers" - Pablo Picasso