[Python-Dev] refleaks and caches (original) (raw)

Christian Heimes lists at cheimes.de
Mon Jan 28 13:54:32 CET 2008

Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:

-On [20080128 03:13], Christian Heimes (lists at cheimes.de) wrote:

Do the int/float free lists cause any trouble or can they eat lots of memory? I hope I am interpreting it correctly, but it seems http://evanjones.ca/memoryallocator/ explanation on that still applies:

[snip]

Yes, the explanation still applies. It took me a while to understand how the free lists are working. Some genius came up with the idea to (ab)use the op_type field of the PyObject struct to link the freed objects. All the time I wondered why it assigns something complete different than a type object to the type field.

In patch http://bugs.python.org/issue1953 I've moved the compact code from the PyFloat/Int_Fini functions to two new functions and exposed them as a single Python function gc.compact_freelists(). It doesn't solve the problem described in the text but at least it gives a user the chance to free some memory manually.

Christian

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