[Python-Dev] Darwin's realloc(...) implementation never shrinks allocations (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum gvanrossum at gmail.com
Mon Jan 3 17:15:24 CET 2005

Coming late to this thread.

I don't see the point of lying awake at night worrying about potential memory losses unless you've heard someone complain about it. As Tim has been trying to explain, here are plenty of other things in Python that we could speed up if there was a need; since every speedup uglifies the code somewhat, we'd end up with very ugly code if we did them all. Remember, don't optimize prematurely.

Here's one theoretical reason why even with socket.recv() it probably doesn't matter in practice: the overallocated string will usually be freed as soon as the data has been parsed from it, and this will free the overallocation as well!

OTOH, if you want to do more research, checking the usage patterns for StringRealloc and TupleRealloc would be useful. I could imagine code in either that makes a copy if the new size is less than some fraction of the old size. Most code that I recall writing using these tends to start with a guaranteed-to-fit overallocation, and a single resize at the end.

-- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

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