[Python-Dev] iterzip() (original) (raw)

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
30 Apr 2002 08:28:17 +0200

Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> writes:

Should we worry about programs that don't create any cyclical garbage for a long time, and then sudenly start creating lots of it?

No. So far, there was only one bug report on SF (that I know of) where GC was not triggered early enough.

In that case, the problem was that there were large strings attached to the cyclic garbage that consumed lots of memory, but contributed little to the object count.

So any application that knows it creates cyclic garbage "on purpose" should explicitly invoke gc.collect from time to time to be safe. Most applications don't need to worry, as they can safely assume that users have enough spare memory for the garbage.

Regards, Martin