[Python-Dev] Int FutureWarnings and other 2.4 TODOs (original) (raw)

Tim Peters tim.one at comcast.net
Fri Dec 5 12:12:38 EST 2003

[Tim]

... So when you do range(10000000), and that list goes away, most of the space for the int objects it held ends up in millions of int objects pushed onto the int freelist. They all stay there until the program shuts down (although they get reused to satisfy requests for new int objects).

BTW, using pymalloc instead wouldn't eliminate that allocated memory is never returned to the OS. pymalloc grabs large "arenas" from malloc(), and never free()s them. The fundamental difference is that pymalloc is type-agnostic: space gotten from pymalloc for, say, a dict, can later be reused for, say, a string. pymalloc's freelists are segregated by raw memory size rather than by type, and a given chunk of pymalloc memory may even move from one size list to another (any number of times).

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