Paul Rubin wrote: > This correctly describes difficulties of using a copying GC in > CPython. Note that the Boehm GC is mark-and-sweep. As Alex mentions, > that usually means there's a pause every so often while the GC scans > the entire heap, touching all data both live and dead (maybe the Boehm > GC got around this somehow).
>From the docs: void GC_enable_incremental(void) Cause the garbage collector to perform a small amount of work every few invocations of GC_MALLOC or the like, instead of performing an entire collection at once. This is likely to increase total running time. It will improve response on a platform that either has suitable support in the garbage collector (Linux and most Unix versions, win32 if the collector was suitably built) or if "stubborn" allocation is used (see gc.h). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list