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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Mon Jun 23 23:08:29 CEST 2008

It would not help the quadratic behaviour - and is orthogonal to your proposal - , but at least avoid calling the GC too often when lots of small objects are allocated (as opposed to lots of large objects).

I'd like to see in an experiment whether this is really true. Current GC only takes into account container objects, which, most significantly, ignores string objects (of which most applications create plenty). If you make actual memory consumption a trigger, the string objects would count towards triggering GC. That may or may not be the better approach, anyway - but it's not certain (for me) that such a scheme would cause GC to be triggered less often, in a typical application.

Regards, Martin

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