[Zope-dev] memory leak

Marco Nova nova@tera-it.com
Tue, 10 Apr 2001 17:27:28 +0200


Hello guys,

It seems that I've some memory leak problems and I want to understand where
I've to look for.

Scenario:

I've an IIS web server that generates an XML page (taking data from
SqlServer);
The Zope web server must retrieve the XML page, manage the data and render
them in HTML (I cant only apply a XSL stylesheet to XML).

The Facts:

I've written a external method that - using httplib - reads the XML page and
return a string that is the raw XML sources, than I've written another
external method that use ExpatBuilder of Products.ParsedXML.DOM to parse the
XML an generate a list of [(id - {mapping})] which will be accessed with a
dtml-in tag, so in the sequence-key I've access to the ID and with
sequence-item I can access to the mapping object.
I'm using latest version of ZOPE (2.3.1, the binary one with Python 1.5.2)
and ParsedXML.

The Problem:

It seems that every time the method retrieve the page or parse the XML I
loose a bunch of kilobytes. Because the methods are very simple (100 lines
of code in total) and because I didn't create any class for handling this
workflow I can't understand where I can loose bytes.

The Questions:

Is the list generated for the dtml-in tag freed automatically by ZOPE ?
Is there a Garbage Collector somewhere that must be activated ?
Should I avoid the use of the ExpatBuilder for XML processing ?

Thanks for listening my newbies questions.


Best Regards,

- mn