Releasing memory in Python

Question

I have a few related questions regarding memory usage in the following example.

1. If I run in the interpreter,

   foo = [\'bar\' for _ in xrange(         
   
   
           

Answer 1

First, you may want to install glances:

sudo apt-get install python-pip build-essential python-dev lm-sensors 
sudo pip install psutil logutils bottle batinfo https://bitbucket.org/gleb_zhulik/py3sensors/get/tip.tar.gz zeroconf netifaces pymdstat influxdb elasticsearch potsdb statsd pystache docker-py pysnmp pika py-cpuinfo bernhard
sudo pip install glances

Then run it in the terminal!

glances

In your Python code, add at the begin of the file, the following:

import os
import gc # Garbage Collector

After using the "Big" variable (for example: myBigVar) for which, you would like to release memory, write in your python code the following:

del myBigVar
gc.collect()

In another terminal, run your python code and observe in the "glances" terminal, how the memory is managed in your system!

Good luck!

P.S. I assume you are working on a Debian or Ubuntu system