Is this a bug? Python intermittently stops dead for seconds

[charlie strauss]

>> 
>I think the point you are missing is that the garbage collector is 
>triggered from time to time to ensure that no cyclical garbage remains 
>uncollected, IIRC. The more data that's been allocated, the longer it 
>takes the collector to scan all of memory to do its job.
>
>If you can find a way to avoid the behaviour I'm sure the development 
>team would be interested to hear it :-)

>
>I think you'll find that most programs that eat through memory in this 
>way will exhibit pretty much the same behaviour. If you *know* your 
>program isn't creating data cycles, just turn the GC off and rely on 
>reference counting. That won't save you from paging when you eventually 
>exhaust physical memory. Nothing can.


Could you clarify that for me.  GC really has three components two it:  1) finding and freeing unrefernced memory by refer counts 2)  cycle removal and 3)  defragementing the storage stack.  If I turn off GC, don't I lose all of these?



>From a user perspective, turning off GC and then managing it yourself is unappealing.  What would be preferrable would be to be able to simply turn down it's threshold.  That is, what I really want is to tell GC it can hold off and checks other than reference counts until X% of the memory is filled.  At some point I want it to kick in, and I don't want to have to programatically manage that, but simply specify a simple tolerance.    

Even better , I'd like to keep 1 and 3 and turn off just 2 and just use weak reference in the few cases I really need them.