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[Python-Dev] Darwin's realloc(...) implementation never shrinks allocations

Bob Ippolito bob at redivi.com
Mon Jan 3 17:30:14 CET 2005 
On Jan 3, 2005, at 11:15 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> Coming late to this thread.
>
> I don't see the point of lying awake at night worrying about potential
> memory losses unless you've heard someone complain about it. As Tim
> has been trying to explain, here are plenty of other things in Python
> that we *could* speed up if there was a need; since every speedup
> uglifies the code somewhat, we'd end up with very ugly code if we did
> them all. Remember, don't optimize prematurely.

We *have* had someone complain about it: http://python.org/sf/1092502

> Here's one theoretical reason why even with socket.recv() it probably
> doesn't matter in practice: the overallocated string will usually be
> freed as soon as the data has been parsed from it, and this will free
> the overallocation as well!

That depends on how socket.recv is used.  Sometimes, a list of strings 
is used rather than a cStringIO (or equivalent), which can cause 
problems (see above referenced bug).

-bob
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