[Zope] Does this create a leak?

[Maric MICHAUD]

Jean-Francois.Doyon at CCRS.NRCan.gc.ca a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> Does setting a persistent object as attribute to another persistent
> object, and then accessing it directly through the web, create a leak?
> 
> For example:
> 
> from OFS.Image import Image
> 
> class myclass(Image):
> 
>     def __init__(self)
>         self.thumbnail = Image(id='thumbnail')
> 
> and then access it using something like:
There's no /leak/, but the thumbnail attribute is a persistent attribute 
of instances of 'myclass'.

> http://host.com/myinstance/thumbnail
> 
> Wouldn't this leave the thumbnail lying around after the GC cycle, since
> once the system is done with the parent instance, the refcount falls to
> zero, it's cleaned out, and the thumbnail is orphaned, creating a memory
> leak?
If I'd want a per request created and garbaged Image instance I'd do 
something like this :

class myclass(Image):
     def thumbnail(self) :
	"""a doc"""
          return Image(id='thumbnail')

But if you want a per database transaction (it should make some valuable 
cache for each http connection) created and garbaged objects you should 
  use zope volatile (_v_) attribute :

class myclass(Image):
     def thumbnail(self) :
	"""a doc"""
          if not hasattr(self, '_v_thumb') :
                   self._v_thumb = Image(id='thumbnail')
          return self._v_thumb

> 
> I was told at some point that this was OK, but now that I'm hunting memory
> leaks and learning more about that, this no longer seems sensible.
> 
> And since I do it all over the place, it'd explain my horrible leak of
> AcquisitionWrappers and HTTPRequests and so on ... As well as high refcount
> for CMFImage.Image ...

Memory leaks appears in python in only one case : if two objects 
mutually reference them and are not referenced elsewhere.
In zope this cannot happen as any object orphaned in the ZODB tree will 
be garbaged.