[Python-Dev] C API for gc.enable() and gc.disable() (original) (raw)

Amaury Forgeot d'Arc amauryfa at gmail.com
Fri Jun 20 17:44:40 CEST 2008

2008/6/20 Kevin Jacobs <jacobs at bioinformed.com> <bioinformed at gmail.com>:

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Kevin Jacobs <jacobs bioinformed.com> <bioinformed gmail.com> writes: > > +1 on a C API for enabling and disabling GC. I have several instances > where I create a large number of objects non-cyclic objects where I see huge GC overhead (30+ seconds with gc enabled, 0.15 seconds when disabled). Could you try to post a stripped-down, self-contained example of such behaviour? $ python -m timeit 'zip(*[range(1000000)]*5)' 10 loops, best of 3: 496 msec per loop $ python -m timeit -s 'import gc; gc.enable()' 'zip(*[range(1000000)]*5)' 10 loops, best of 3: 2.93 sec per loop

I remember that a similar issue was discussed some months ago: http://bugs.python.org/issue2607

In short: the gc is tuned for typical usage. If your usage of python is specific, use gc.set_threshold and increase its values.

-- Amaury Forgeot d'Arc

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