Thanks for the info. I now suspect that the free lists are taking up the memory which won't be released unless we do a collect. I'm verifying that.
On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 10:43:11 PM UTC+5:30, Dave Angel wrote: > On 03/19/2013 12:36 PM, Bodhi wrote: > > > I know this, but my question is what does gc.collect do which results in > > the c library to free memory? Usually it is because of unreferenced objects > > in a cycle or something, but here that doesn't seem to be the case. > > > > > > > As I said, python calls the C free() function, whether it's when an > > object's ref-count goes to zero, or whether it's during a gc call, where > > circular refs are freed. > > > > But free() does not necessarily release the memory to the OS. And the > > times it does depends on which C library is being used, and what OS it's > > running on. > > > > If the freed memory affects top in some situations, it's a C library > > detail. I've written a replacement C allocator in the past for Windows > > that used a different scheme for blocks over a certain threshold, and > > when those blocks were freed, it gave them back to the OS. But such > > blocks were multiples of 64k, which was the increment for VirtualAlloc. > > > > > > > > > > -- > > DaveA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
