Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote: > For me, a relative newbie to Python, the entire memory allocation issue is > not transparent at all and information about it is scattered across the net. > One of the things I hope to contribute to in the coming year is to make sure > the entire area of Python memory use and proper coding is better understood.
Python uses its own memory allocator for small objecst (< 257 bytes). Larger objects are allocated directly with malloc, smaller objects end up in arenas. The code is well documented in http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Objects/obmalloc.c?rev=56476&view=auto Several objects keep a free list for performance reasons. Free list save some extra mallocs and initialization of data structures. I've renamed all free lists in Python 2.6 to "free_list". Ints and floats are using their own block allocation algorithm. The code predates Python's pymalloc code. I'm working on replacing the code with pymalloc because pymalloc-ed memory is given back to the OS. The int and float free lists keep their sizes until the Python process ends. Christian -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
