Python Memory Performance
I’ve been studying Python because it is extensively used in open source projects to script certain types of work or actions. I think Mozilla uses it to verify build time requirements, for example.
But, python itself is a full fledged programming language — not really a scripting language. In fact, Mercurial is written in Python which at first amazed me.
So, anyway as part of my pursuit of studying Firefox, I thought I should (at least) learn the basics of Python so that I could read any relevant scripts. Python is quite different from other languages I’ve encountered.
One thing I started to notice about python is that it seems to use more memory. I’m not sure, nor am I suggesting that it uses more than other languages. I just noticed that memory consumption seemed to grow rapidly when running a python script.
The following article seems to explain why. Instantiating a class is expensive. According to the article, a class is 336 bytes. Since in general, a class will use multiple other classes, I can see why memory consumption was growing rapidly.
Ultimately, I don’t think it matters. You just need to be aware that it happens. A modern computer will run the script without any notice to this phenomenon. You’d need to create a lot of objects to cause a problem. But I do beleive it is worth acknowledge that it happens so that you can be aware of the memory usage. It’s mostly noticeable on my work computer (the company provided) which only has 1 GBs of RAM (it runs Windows XP).
