On 2007-04-25, Chris Mellon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > "Returning memory to the OS" doesn't affect exhaustion of your virtual > address space. More likely, your nested loops are just creating more > objects than is possible to hold within a single process.
I'm a bit fuzzy on this, but I don't think there _is_ a practical way to "return memory to the OS" in many OSes. For example in Unix the C library uses the sbrk() call to increase the size of the data segment when additional memory is needed to handle soemthing like malloc() calls. In theory, one can use brk() to reduce the size of the data segment, but I think making the segment smaller will produce undefined behavior if any of the standard C library's dynamic memory routines (e.g. malloc/free) have ever been used by the program prior to the call to brk(). -- Grant Edwards grante Yow! FEELINGS are cascading at over me!!! visi.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list