[Zope] pyperl leaks memory

[Solomon Bessire]

The following Python script leaks about 8MB on my system (Debian Woody, Perl 5.6.1, Python 2.1.3, pyperl-1.0.1).  Python's cyclic garbage collection is enabled.  Perl is compiled w/o threads.  pyperl is compiled w/o MULTI_PERL.


#!/usr/bin/env python
import perl
# create 100000 empty perl arrays and immediately discard them.
for x in range(100000):
    perl.array(())


The MULTI_PERL code (that does not get used because of the singly-threaded Perl) appears to have a reference counting scheme.  For those of you with multi-threaded Perl, does the previous program leak/consume substantial memory?

Is there some way to force garbage collection or manually decrement the reference count?

Is there an extra reference stored because of the shared Python/Perl object that prevents either the Perl or Python GC routines from garbage collecting the unused objects?

I've gotten around the problem by running the leaky code in a fork, but that's sloppy and shouldn't be necessary.  

pyperl can be found at: http://downloads.activestate.com/Zope-Perl/pyperl-1.0.1.tar.gz if you're interested.

Thank you.