John Nagle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes on Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:41:41 -0700: > Dieter Maurer wrote: > > Christian Heimes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes on Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:47:32 > > +0200: > >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] schrieb: > >>> which made me suggest to use these as defaults, but then > > > We observed similar very bad behaviour -- in a Web application server. > > Apparently, the standard behaviour is far from optimal when the > > system contains a large number of objects and occationally, large > > numbers of objects are created in a short time. > > We have seen such behaviour during parsing of larger XML documents, for > > example (in our Web application). > > Our solution to that was to modify BeautifulSoup to use weak pointers. > All the pointers towards the root and towards previous parts of the > document are "weak". As a result, reference counting alone is sufficient > to manage the tree. We still keep GC enabled, but it doesn't find much > to collect.
It will not help in our setup. We, too, have almost no cycles -- but the GC does not know this: If a large number of objects are created temporarily and not released before the generation 1 threshoold is reached, then the garbage collector will start collections -- even, if there are no or very few cycles. A generation 2 garbage collection takes time proportional to the total number of (GC aware) objects -- independent of the number of cycles. Dieter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
