[IPython-user] question about garbage collection

[killian koepsell]

I meant to post this to the list.

kilian


---------- Forwarded message ----------

Hi Fernando,

> There is in principle no automatic way of getting all object
> references in python.  However, since most important variables you
> care about live in a dict called _ip.user_ns, you could write a bit of
> code to build the reverse mapping to find all the references bound to
> a given object in that namespace:
>
> refs = {}
> for k in _ip.user_ns.keys():
>    refs.setdefault(id(_ip.user_ns[k]),[]).append(k)

that is very useful information and helped me to narrow down where the
extra reference to my object is coming from.

if i edit a simple script test.py that does nothing than creating an object:

class C(object):
   def __del__(self):
       print 'deleting object...'

c = C()

this object is afterwards in the namespace and it is also referenced by the
dictionary _ip.user_ns:

In [1]: edit test_destructor.py
Editing... done. Executing edited code...

In [2]: import gc

In [3]: refs = gc.get_referrers(c)

In [4]: map(id,refs)
Out[4]: [7607760]

In [5]: id (_ip.user_ns)
Out[5]: 7607760

the del command removes the only reference and the garbage is collected:

In [6]: del c
deleting object...

however, when i run the example script with the %run command, there seem
to be _two_ references created and del does not destroy the object.

In [7]: run test_destructor.py

In [8]: refs = gc.get_referrers(c)

In [9]: map(id,refs)
Out[9]: [7808896, 7607760]

In [10]: del c

i wasn't able to figure out what the name of the other object (7808896) is,
but it is another dictionary and if i remove the extra reference, my object
is deleted:

In [11]: type(refs[0])
Out[23]: <type 'dict'>

In [12]: refs[0].keys()
Out[24]: ['C', '__nonzero__', '__builtins__', '__file__', 'c']

In [13]: del refs[0]['c']
deleting object...

Do you know where this extra dictionary lives?
Is there a separate namespace created for each file that is run by the
%run command?

Thanks,
 Kilian