I'm running a python program that simulates a wireless network protocol for a certain number of "frames" (measure of time). I've observed the following:
1. The memory consumption of the program grows as the number of frames I simulate increases. To verify this, I've used two methods, which I invoke after every frame simulated: -- Parsing the /proc/<pid>/status file as in: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/286222 -- Using ps vg | grep python | awk '!/grep/ {print " ",$8}' in an os.system() call. The memory usage vs. frame number graph shows some big "jumps" at certain points, and, after a large number of frames, shows a steady upward slope 2. I think I've verified that the objects I instantiate are actually freed-- I'm therefore assuming that this "leak" is "caused" by python's garbage collection mechanism. I count the number of objects I generate that are being tracked by gc as follows: gc.collect() objCount = {} objList = gc.get_objects() for obj in objList: if getattr(obj, "__class__", None): name = obj.__class__.__name__ if objCount.has_key(name): objCount[name] += 1 else: objCount[name] = 1 for name in objCount: print name, " :", objCount[name] del objList Running this snippet every hundred frames or so, shows that the number of objects managed by gc is not growing. I upgraded to Python 2.5. in an attempt to solve this problem. The only change in my observations from version 2.4 is that the absolute memory usage level seems to have dropped. However, I still see the jumps in memory usage at the same points in time. Can anybody explain why the memory usage shows significant jumps (~200 kB or ~500 kb) over time (i.e. "frames") even though there is no apparent increase in the objects managed by gc? Note that I'm calling gc.collect() regularly. Thanks for your attention, Arvind -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
