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Message: [QUOTE="Tom Wright, post: 2766914"] I know it's a very artificial setup - I was trying to make the situation simple to demonstrate in a few lines. The point was that it's not caching the values of those integers, as they can never be read again through the Python interface. It's just holding onto the space they occupy in case it's needed again. I have a program which reads a few thousand text files, converts each to a list (with readlines()), creates a short summary of the contents of each (a few floating point numbers) and stores this summary in a master list. From the amount of memory it's using, I think that the lists containing the contents of each file are kept in memory, even after there are no references to them. Also, if I tell it to discard the master list and re-read all the files, the memory use nearly doubles so I presume it's keeping the lot in memory. The program may run through several collections of files, but it only keeps a reference to the master list of the most recent collection it's looked at. Obviously, it's not ideal if all the old collections hang around too, taking up space and causing the machine to swap. I agree. I don't want to manage it myself. I just want it to re-use memory or hand it back to the OS if it's got an awful lot that it's not using. Wouldn't you say it was wasteful if (say) an image editor kept an uncompressed copy of an image around in memory after the image had been closed? [/QUOTE]