Re: [Matplotlib-users] Re: memory leaks, 0.54.1 with .2a modifications

[John H. <jdh...@ac...>]

>>>>> "Eric" == Eric Firing <ef...@km...> writes:

    Eric> Yes, I saw that, tried putting in explicit gc.collect()
    Eric> calls, but it didn't help.  I concluded the problem was
    Eric> different.  I also looked at the draw function in
    Eric> backend_gtk.py.  What I don't understand is how and when the
    Eric> no-longer-used gtk objects (pixmap, etc) really can and
    Eric> should be de-allocated.  Evidently they persist when the
    Eric> python reference to them goes out of scope.

    Eric> Thanks for your changes.

Hi Eric,

You can test the new release which includes both Steve's changes and a
number of fixes on my end.  I'll attach the script below that I used
to profile the leak, a modified version of your script.  By my
numbers, the average memory consumed per loop is down from 145.9 using
0.54.1 to 12.3 using 0.54.2.  Not perfect, but more than 10x better.

I have definitely identified a leak in freetype (as mentioned above,
which is fixed in freetype CVS) and there appears to be a leak in
libpng but I have tracked down precisely where.  Neither of these are
terribly large.  I strongly suspect that some of the remaining leak is
my doing, so I'll continue to try and sniff these out.  The python
code uses a lot of circular references (figures contain axes and text
which in turn contain a reference to the figure that contains them and
so on) which makes the task a little harder.

Let me know how it goes.

JDH


import os, sys, time
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('Agg')
from matplotlib.matlab import *


def report_memory(i):
    pid = os.getpid()
    a2 = os.popen('ps -p %d -o rss,sz' % pid).readlines()
    print i, '  ', a2[1],
    return int(a2[1].split()[0])


def updatefig(i):
    ind = arange(100)
    xx = rand(len(ind), 1)
    figure(1)
    plot(ind, xx[:,0])
    savefig('dd_ef%d.png' % i, dpi = 75)
    close(1)

    return report_memory(i)


N = 100
for i in range(N):
   val = updatefig(i)
   if i==1: start = val

end = val
print 'Average memory consumed per loop: %1.4f\n' % ((end-start)/float(N))