[Twisted-web] Finding memory leaks in Nevow/Twisted

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:23:16 -0500, Phil Christensen <phil at bubblehouse.org> wrote:
>On Dec 16, 2008, at 10:07 AM, Abdul-Wahid Paterson wrote:
>>I have managed to write my nevow/twisted site. I am using a lot of  Athena 
>>elements on my site and they are all working well from a  functional point 
>>of view. However, the Athena elements are eating up  RAM and as I leave 
>>things running the Twisted process slowly  consumes more and more RAM until 
>>the process dies.
>
>The first thing would be to check that you're running at least Python  2.5. 
>Previous versions have garbage collection problems on long- running apps 
>like a Twisted web app.

I think this is an overstatement of the memory allocation issues in Python
2.4 and older. :)  Python 2.5 does a better job of backing off from peak
allocation, but it's entirely possible to have a long running Python 2.4
process which doesn't grow in memory usage without bounds.  I have a Python
2.4 server which often runs for months at a time and has stable memory
usage - at the moment, it's been running since Nov 7 and is using 133MB of
memory, a size it reached within a couple hours of starting up.

Jean-Paul