GNUe Traffic #118 For 29 May 

Editor: Peter Sullivan

By Peter Sullivan

Table Of Contents

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• Introduction
• Threads Covered

  1.

  30 May

  Garbage collection in Python

Introduction

1. Garbage collection in Python

30 May  Archive Link: "[IRC] 30 May 2006"

Summary By Peter Sullivan

Topics: Application Server

People: Reinhard Müller, Derek Neighbors, Jason Cater, Derek Neighbours

Further to Issue #117, Section #1  (16 May : Performance tuning of Application Server) , Reinhard Müller (reinhard) passed on "some further info about performance issues in appserver and in gnue in general - over the weekend I was having a talk with another developer that was fighting performance issues in python, and this developer had the very same problem that garbage collection is *the* performance killer in python and close to impossible to optimize as it runs just at random times and it can't be easily found out which function causes which garbage" . Derek Neighbours (derek) pointed to "a good article (http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/python/MinimizingObjectChurn) on this subject" that "gave examples on how to avoid object churning" . However, he noted that "when we chose python the primary reason was - python values productivity over performance :) - is gnue to a point where it needs to consider optimization?" . Jason Cater (jcater) did not think so - "I think the question just came up in the context of some tests someone was doing with a new comm backend" .

Sharon And Joy