Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Profiling memory

Before we start to hunt down memory issues in Python, you should know that the nature of memory leaks in Python is quite special. In some compiled languages such as C and C++, the memory leaks are almost exclusively caused by allocated memory blocks that are no longer referenced by any pointer. If you don't have reference to memory, you cannot release it, and this very situation is called a memory leak. In Python, there is no low level memory management available for the user, so we instead deal with leaking references—references to objects that are not needed anymore but were not removed. This stops the interpreter from releasing resources, but is not the same situation as a memory leak in C. Of course, there is always the ...