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Date: Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:25:34 -0500
From: Dave Angel <davea@davea.name>
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Subject: Re: Set x to  to None and del x doesn't release memory in python 2.7.1 (HPUX 11.23, ia64)
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On 03/06/2013 07:31 AM, Wong Wah Meng-R32813 wrote:
> Apologies as after I have left the group for a while I have forgotten how not to post a question on top of another question. Very sorry and appreciate your replies.
>
> I tried explicitly calling gc.collect() and didn't manage to see the memory footprint reduced. I probably haven't left the process idle long enough to see the internal garbage collection takes place but I will leave it idle for more than 8 hours and check again. Thanks!
>

You're top-posting, which makes things very confusing, since your 
contribution to the message is out of accepted order.  Put your remarks 
after the part you're commenting on, and delete anything following your 
message, as it clearly didn't need your comments.

Once you've called gc.collect(), there's no point in waiting 8 hours for 
it to run again.  It either triggered the C runtime's logic or it 
didn't, and running it again won't help unless in the meantime you 
rearranged the remaining allocated blocks.

Accept the fact that not all freeing of memory blocks can possibly make 
it through to the OS.  If they did, we'd have a minimum object size of 
at least 4k on the Pentium, and larger on some other processors.  We'd 
also have performance that would crawl. So an external tool can only 
give you a very approximate size for what's going on in your own code.

-- 
DaveA