Why disable the garbage collector?

Question

Pythons gc.disable disables automatic garbage collection. As I understand it, that would have quite some side-effects. Why would anyone want to disable automatic garbage colle

Answer 1

One use for disabling the garbage collector is to get more consistent results when timing the performance of code. The timeit module does this.

def timeit(self, number=default_number):
    if itertools:
        it = itertools.repeat(None, number)
    else:
        it = [None] * number
    gcold = gc.isenabled()
    gc.disable()
    ...

In Python2 and up to Python3.2 gc.disable() is also used to avoid a bug caused by garbage collection occurring between fork and exec. The problem seems to have been fixed in Python3.3 without needing to call gc.disable().