On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 6:56 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Oct 21, 5:19 pm, Rolf Wester <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I have the problem that with long running Python scripts (many loops) >> memory consumption increases until the script crashes. I used the >> following small script to understand what might happen: >> > <snip> > > AFAIK, python uses malloc behind the scenes to allocate memory. From > the malloc man page... > > "The malloc() and free() functions provide a simple, general-purpose > memory allocation package. The malloc() function returns a pointer to > a block of at least size bytes suitably aligned for any use. If the > space assigned by malloc() is overrun, the results are undefined. > > The argument to free() is a pointer to a block previously allocated by > malloc(), calloc(), or realloc(). After free() is executed, this space > is made available for further allocation by the application, though > not returned to the system. Memory is returned to the system only > upon termination of the application. If ptr is a null pointer, no > action occurs. If a random number is passed to free(), the results are > undefined."
Depending on your malloc implementation, that may not be true. IN particular, with glibc, bit allocations are done with mmap, and those areas are unmaped when free is called; any such area is immediatly returned to the system http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/libc/Malloc-Tunable-Parameters.html#Malloc-Tunable-Parameters David -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
