Garbage collection working improperly?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Hi,

> Builds up a great list in memory and immediately deletes it. Unfortunately

if all you want is to create a loop, use xrange instead of range - it 
won't create that huge list.

> the task manager shows me that i allocated about 155MB in memory before
> del(), but del only releases about 40MB of them so i'm leaving about 117 MB
> of reserved memory after deleting the list.
> I'm using python 2.2.3 on WinXP.
> Any ideas about that? How can i dealloc the left memory space?

Nope, no idea - the only thing that I can think of is that python not 
necessarily releaseses the memory because it uses its own allocation 
scheme. I don't know that for sure, but I definitely would go for such a 
thingy if I was to implement a virtual machine.
Its like in JAVA - each object instantiation and destruction isn't 
paired with system malloc/free calls, but some internal memory manager 
deals with that. And if it rans out of space, it will request more from 
the system.

Regards,

Diez