Releasing memory in Python

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I have a few related questions regarding memory usage in the following example.

1. If I run in the interpreter,

   foo = ["bar" for _ in xrange(10000000)]
   

   the real memory used on my machine goes up to 80.9mb. I then,

   del foo
   

   real memory goes down, but only to 30.4mb. The interpreter uses 4.4mb baseline so what is the advantage in not releasing 26mb of memory to the OS? Is it because Python is "planning ahead", thinking that you may use that much memory again?

2. Why does it release 50.5mb in particular - what is the amount that is released based on?

3. Is there a way to force Python to release all the memory that was used (if you know you won"t be using that much memory again)?

NOTE This question is different from How can I explicitly free memory in Python? because this question primarily deals with the increase of memory usage from baseline even after the interpreter has freed objects via garbage collection (with use of gc.collect or not).

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Releasing memory in Python __del__: Questions

import time
time.sleep(5)   # Delays for 5 seconds. You can also use a float value.

import time
while True:
    print("This prints once a minute.")
    time.sleep(60) # Delay for 1 minute (60 seconds).

from time import sleep
sleep(0.1) # Time in seconds

Releasing memory in Python __del__: Questions

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