help with a python memory leak

We're going to need to see the actual code of the function and the code where you call foo().

The most likely cause is that you're creating a circular reference to the object. Since CPython implements a reference counted garbage collector, if you create two objects that reference each other, they'll never get destroyed unless you manually destroy the reference yourself. This usually means you have to set the reference = None once you're ready for the object to be collected.

EDIT: Correction: python collects cycles as long as there isn't a __del__ method defined on the object. Otherwise it cannot know which __del__ should be invoked first.

[Edited by - smr on January 10, 2007 11:18:52 AM]

ok, here is the function -
ratingsMatrixTo(i,j) builds some (N x 2) matrix based on the values of i and j, N is function(i, j) as well
AVG is a known vector

def correlationFunction(i, j):    if (i == j): return 0    R = ratingsMatrixTo(i,j)    I = R[:, 0] - AVG[i-1]    J = R[:, 1] - AVG[j-1]        II = dot(I, I)    JJ = dot(J, J)    result = dot(I, J) / N.sqrt(II*JJ)    del R, I, J    return result

i dont think where i'm calling it from is relevant - when finishing with correlationFunction i ditch the inner matrix and vectors and just return a number. let me know if you need it though
thanks

I don't think anything in there should be causing a leak. What does the ratingsMatrixTo function do?