The workaround I went with made use of the shelve module and calls to gc.collect() to cap the memory consumed by the Python allocator. It was a bit intrusive but it got the job done.
Would a method in the gc module that released memory to malloc be something that could get added to Python? Or are there some reasons why allowing that would be a bad idea? Regards, Iker P.S. This may be a repeat of an earlier message - it seems that google groups may have discarded my earlier post. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Is there any way to get Python to release memory back to the > C allocator? I'm currently running a script that goes through > the following steps: > > 1) Creates a very large number of Python objects to produce > a relatively small data structure that sits in a C extension. > The Python objects consume quite a bit of memory. > > 2) Releases all the Python objects. > > 3) Invokes a function of said C extension for further > processing. This step needs as much memory as possible. > > I'd like step 2 to return memory to the C allocator so that it > is available to the extension in step 3 (which uses malloc). > > Regards, > Iker Arizmendi -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
