Question

Am I doing something wrong or does web.py leak memory?

import web

class Index:
  def GET(self): return 'hello web.py'
app = web.application(('/*', 'Index'), globals())
app.run()

Run the above file. Watch how much memory the task uses. Go to localhost:8080 in your browser. Close the browser (to keep the page from getting cached), then open the page again, and see how the memory usage rises. It goes up every time you close the browser and re-visit the page.

Running python 2.6 on Win XP.

Answer 1

After running your code and sending it thousands of requests (via another Python process using urllib2), I find that it grows by about 200k over the course of the first few hundred requests and then stops growing. That doesn’t seem unreasonable, and it needn’t indicate a memory leak. Remember that Python uses automatic memory management via a combination of reference counting and garbage collection, so there’s no guarantee that every bit of memory it uses is reusable the instant it’s no longer in use; and it may request memory from the OS and then not return it even though it isn’t needed any more.

So I think the answer is: You aren’t doing anything wrong, but web.py doesn’t leak memory.