Robin schrieb: > If I try to allocate something too big for the available memory I > often get a MemoryError exception. However, in other situations, > Python memory use continues to grow until the machine falls over. I > was hoping to understand the difference between those cases. From what > I've read Python never returns memory to the OS (is this right?) so > the second case, python is holding on to memory that it isn't really > using (for objects that have been destroyed). I guess my question is > why doesn't it reuse the memory freed from object deletions instead of > requesting more - and even then when requesting more, why does it > continue until the machine falls over and not cause a MemoryError?
Your assumption isn't correct. Python releases memory. For small objects Python uses its own memory allocation system as explained in http://svn.python.org/projects/python/trunk/Objects/obmalloc.c . For integer and floats uses a separate block allocation schema. Christian _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
