- Terminology
- Object Identity and Type
- Reference Counting and Garbage Collection
- References and Copies
- Built-in Types
- Special Methods
- Performance Considerations
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Reference Counting and Garbage Collection
All objects are reference-counted. An object’s reference count is increased whenever it’s assigned to a new name or placed in a container such as a list, tuple, or dictionary, as shown here:
a = 3.4 # Creates an object '3.4' b = a # Increases reference count on '3.4' c = [] c.append(b) # Increases reference count on '3.4'
This example creates a single object containing the value 3.4. a is merely a name that refers to the newly created object. When b is assigned a, b becomes a new name for the same object, and the object’s reference count increases. Likewise, when you place b into a list, the object’s reference count increases again. Throughout the example, only one object contains 3.4. All other operations are simply creating new references to the object.
An object’s reference count is decreased by the del statement or whenever a reference goes out of scope (or is reassigned). For example:
del a # Decrease reference count of 3.4 b = 7.8 # Decrease reference count of 3.4 c[0]=2.0 # Decrease reference count of 3.4
When an object’s reference count reaches zero, it is garbage-collected. However, in some cases a circular dependency may exist among a collection of objects that are no longer in use. For example:
a = { }
b = { }
a[‘b’] = b # a contains reference to b
b[‘a’] = a # b contains reference to a
del a
del b
In this example, the del statements decrease the reference count of a and b and destroy the names used to refer to the underlying objects. However, because each object contains a reference to the other, the reference count doesn’t drop to zero and the objects remain allocated (resulting in a memory leak). To address this problem, the interpreter periodically executes a cycle-detector that searches for cycles of inaccessible objects and deletes them. The cycle-detection algorithm can be fine-tuned and controlled using functions in the gc module.