Speeding up Python's exit
Steven D'Aprano
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info
Thu Feb 28 11:49:46 EST 2013
I just quit an interactive session using Python 2.7 on Linux. It took in
excess of twelve minutes to exit, with the load average going well past 9
for much of that time.
I think the reason it took so long was that Python was garbage-collecting
a giant dict with 10 million entries, each one containing a list of the
form [1, [2, 3], 4]. But still, that's terribly slow -- ironically, it
took longer to dispose of the dict (12+ minutes) than it took to create
it in the first place (approx 3 minutes, with a maximum load of 4).
Can anyone explain why this was so painfully slow, and what (if anything)
I can do to avoid it in the future?
I know there is a function os._exit which effectively kills the Python
interpreter dead immediately, without doing any cleanup. What are the
consequences of doing this? I assume that the memory used by the Python
process will be reclaimed by the operating system, but other resources
such as opened files may not be.
--
Steven
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