Python does not guarantee to return memory to the operating system. Whether it does or not depends on the OS, but as a general rule, you should expect that it will not.
>>>> for i in range(100000L): > ... str=str+"%s"%(i,) You should never build large strings in that way. It risks being horribly, horribly slow on some combinations of OS, Python implementation and version. Instead, you should do this: items = ["%s" % i for i in range(100000)] s = ''.join(items) [] The example is written for illustration purpose. Thanks for pointing out a better way of achieving the same result. Yes it seems so that the OS thinks the piece allocated to Python should not be taken back unless the process dies. :( -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
