Wierd behavior of gc.collect
Dave Angel
davea at davea.name
Tue Mar 19 12:02:27 EDT 2013
On 03/19/2013 11:47 AM, Bodhi wrote:
> I have a python process that does some operations and is supposed to release memory after those. The issue is that memory is not released (as seen through top). So I do a gc.collect() to see if there is any cycle etc. Immediately after doing the collect memory usage drops as expected, but strangely gc.collect() returns 0.
> This means I cannot find out what the problem is by setting the debug option on gc which is what I usually do to figure out issues like this.
>
> Maybe its that my understanding about it is incorrect, but if gc.collect returned 0, how come some memory was freed?
>
To put it simply, top won't in general show you that things are freed.
The C libraries for malloc and free will reuse the memory, but not
usually release it to the operating system. So it's not usually going
to show up in 'top.'
There was a long thread on this quite recently, but I can't seem to find
it right now.
--
DaveA
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