On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Steve <n...@spam.com> wrote: > Well, I guess I was confused by the terminology. I thought there were leaked > objects _after_ a garbage collection had been run (as it said "collecting > generation 2").
That means that it's going to check all objects. The garbage collector divides the objects up into "generations", based on how many collection attempts they've so far survived (due to not being unreachable). For efficiency, higher generation objects are checked less frequently than lower generation objects, and generation 2 is the highest. > Also, "unreachable" actually appears to mean "unreferenced". Not exactly. CPython uses reference counting as well as periodic garbage collection, so an unreferenced object is deallocated immediately. "Unreachable" means that the object is referenced but cannot be reached via direct or indirect reference from any stack frame -- i.e., the object is only referenced in unreachable reference cycles. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
