On 2019-06-15, Tim Peters wrote: > At the start, obmalloc never returned arenas to the system. The vast > majority of users were fine with that.
Yeah, I was totally fine with that back in the day. However, I wonder now if there is a stronger reason to try to free memory back to the OS. Years ago, people would typically have swap space that was as large or larger than their real RAM. So, if the OS had to swap out unused pages, it wasn't a big deal. Now that disks are relatively so much slower and RAM is larger, people don't have as much swap. Some Linux systems get setup without any. Freeing arenas seems more important than it used to be. OTOH, I don't think obmalloc should try too hard. The whole point of the small object allocator is to be really fast. Anti-fragmentation heuristics are going to slow it down. As far as I'm concerned, it works well enough as it is. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/Z6O5HPSLQXNUHTY6GY7WN4KUB43J6QGV/
