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Context: we’re experimenting with disabling the gc entirely for some workloads because it doesn’t fare too well with Copy-on-Write on Linux. What ends up happening is that disabling the gc actually drops memory usage significantly if you’re using hundreds of the same processes on one box :-)

However, because of PyGC\_Collect() called in Py\_Finalize(), during interpreter shutdown the collection is done anyway, Linux does CoW and the memory usage spikes. Which is ironic on process shutdown.