Michele Simionato wrote:
On Aug 10, 2:25 am, Godzilla <godzillais...@gmail.comwrote:
>Hello,
I wish to know whether I should delete objects created on the fly via
the "del obj" statement. I noticed the RAM usage increased whenever
the application is being run for a long time. I am creating lots of
objects (messages) on the fly for communication between threads.
Rather than having python's gc to do the work, does it make a
difference if I force a deletion?
Thanks.
Probably not, 'del x' just decrements the reference count, but
it is the gc who does the real job. See http://docs.python.org/ref/customization.html#l2h-175
Do you have reference cycles in your application? You should
tell us something more.
Michele Simionato
del x will remove x from memory if nothing else is refering to it, but
this dosnt really take the load off the GC since the GC will still check
the references and remove if there are none.
In some cases you could use to save ram...
a = 'really big string'
....do stuff with a...
del a
b = 'another really big string'
....do stuff with b...
del b
in the case that 'a' is not needed, after its used, and you dont want to
re-use the variable name. then del will free some ram since they both
wont need to exist at the same time.
WHen I say free ram, python its self will probably keep the ram for
later use but at least it wont need a and b in memory at once, so its
likely not to use as much ram.
But be careful using del in a loop since it can slow things down, its
like adding and removing an item from a dictionary many times. your
better off just redefining that variable or using del after the loops
finished.
