Debug Memory Leak In Python Flask | Python Object Memory Allocation Internals

How to debug memory leak in python flask app using tracemalloc. Understand python internals like pyobject and memory allocation patterns

Python being a high level interpreted language, it never bothers us to deal with garbage collection. However, because we do not explicitly free memory as we do in C language, python has to clean it for us and hence there is garbage collection involved with python. While garbage collection works most of the time and never becomes an issue, when there is a memory leak in the code, we have no choice but to dig deeper to uncover it.

In this video, we will first look at how python manages memory and how does garbage collection works with python. We will look at some hands-on examples to confirm the python memory management behavior and we will see why is it important to be aware of this behavior.

Further, we will look at a simulated memory leak scenario that we faced in production with Flask environment and we will look at one of the ways we used to hunt it down.

Talk Blog Entry: https://superuser.blog/pycon-lets-hunt-memory-leak/
Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_c4_khxTBC0mtifWp1CwJl3_5Gp6ZTFbVzoafEirOig/edit?usp=sharing

Blog On Memory Leak: https://superuser.blog/detect-memory-leak-python/
Blog On Integer Behaviour: https://superuser.blog/python-2-integers/