On Wed, 06 Mar 2013 10:11:12 +0000, Wong Wah Meng-R32813 wrote: > Hello there, > > I am using python 2.7.1 built on HP-11.23 a Itanium 64 bit box. > > I discovered following behavior whereby the python process doesn't seem > to release memory utilized even after a variable is set to None, and > "deleted". I use glance tool to monitor the memory utilized by this > process. Obviously after the for loop is executed, the memory used by > this process has hiked to a few MB. However, after "del" is executed to > both I and str variables, the memory of that process still stays at > where it was. > > Any idea why?
Python does not guarantee to return memory to the operating system. Whether it does or not depends on the OS, but as a general rule, you should expect that it will not. >>>> for i in range(100000L): > ... str=str+"%s"%(i,) You should never build large strings in that way. It risks being horribly, horribly slow on some combinations of OS, Python implementation and version. Instead, you should do this: items = ["%s" % i for i in range(100000)] s = ''.join(items) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
