Garbage collection

[Simon Pickles]

Hi,

I'm building a server with python, but coming from a c++ background,
garbage collection seems strange.

For instance, I have a manager looking after many objects in a dict.
When those objects are no longer needed, I use del manager[objectid],
hoping to force the garbage collector to perform the delete.

However, this doesn't trigger my overloaded __del__ destructor. Can I
simply rely on the python garbage collector to take it from here?

Is there a way to find how many references exist for an object?

Thanks

Simon