On Aug 25, 2:08 am, Chris Withers <ch...@simplistix.co.uk> wrote: > Martin v. Löwis wrote: > > Today, there are two cases when malloc returns memory on a typical > > Unix system (in particular, in Linux malloc): > > a) if the malloc block block is small (below page size), it is allocated > > from the brk heap, where it can only be returned if the last page of > > that heap is completely free, and > > b) if the block is large (multiple pages), it gets returned to the > > system right away. > > > Case b) can only happen if the C malloc uses mmap to allocate large > > blocks. > > I believe (and John will correct me if I'm wrong) that xlrd uses mmap, > so why am I not seeing the memory being returned?
xlrd uses mmap to access the input file; this seems to have zero correlation with "the C malloc uses mmap to allocate large blocks". -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
