How to Add Memory Leaks to Python
One of our greatest bragging rights is the lack of memory management in our Python code and the wonder of garbage collection, so when we find a way to get a memory leak in Python, it should be made well known. I don't know if this is already known, or not. In actuality, these situations are known as reference leaks, sometimes, and they are cases where we forget to remove a reference to an object we don't want to keep around anymore. The following session will cause this problem.
Python 2.4.3 (#2, Oct 6 2006, 07:52:30)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> def f():
... for i in xrange(100):
... yield i
... raise Exception("oh no!")
...
>>> [x for x in f()]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "
File "
Exception: oh no!
>>> globals()['_[1]']
[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99]
>>>
Now, there is a global that will sit around referencing a potentially very large list and we won't be aware of it. However, it will be overwritten if another list comprehension is run in the same scope, which will be removed if the new LC is successful, and if we do our LCs in functions, the local will be cleaned up on return or raise. Of course, you can always just pass a generator expression to list() and avoid the problem entirely.
Just keep an eye out, if you build global constants with list comprehensions.
3 comments:
Doesn't '_' only exist in the interactive interpreter?
"_" in the interactive interpreter is completely different than "_[1]" in globals
<pre>
Python 2.5 (r25:51908, Sep 19 2006, 09:52:17) [MSC v.1310 32 bit (Intel)]
IPython 0.8.0 -- An enhanced Interactive Python.
In [1]: def f():
...: for i in xrange(10):
...: yield i
...: raise Exception("oh no!")
...:
In [2]: [x for x in f()]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
<type 'exceptions.Exception'> Traceback (most recent call last)
...
<type 'exceptions.Exception'>: oh no!
In [3]: 5
Out[3]: 5
In [4]: _
Out[4]: 5
In [5]: globals()['_[1]']
Out[5]: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
</pre>
Of course, if your code raises an exception at the global level, you're going to have other problems besides the left-over list...
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