Seb Bacon wrote:
So, say Foo is leaking because it is referenced from O which can't be collected. Given 100 things which refer to Foo, how do I identify which one is O? And of course, then O may be leaking because it is referenced from P...
I've been looking into memory leaks of my own, and put together a small module that outputs the information available from the gc.garbage list in a format that Graphviz (http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/) can then render as an image (GIF, SVG, etc) that makes it a bit easier to see the cycles. Here's a sample image: http://barryp.org/misc/simpletal_visualize/test2.gif Here's the code http://barryp.org/misc/simpletal_visualize/visualize_pyobjects.py It shouldn't be too hard to use that in your own code, something like: import visualize_pyobjects gc.collect() cycles = visualize_pyobjects.prune_stems(gc.garbage) visualize_pyobjects.create_dot(cycles, '/tmp/foo.dot') and then, run the graphviz 'dot' program from the command line to create a GIF file: dot -Tgif </tmp/foo.dot >/tmp/foo.gif (use a '-Tsvg' option to create an SVG file, which is smaller and easily viewed and edited with things like sodipodi I believe) Barry