Is there a memory leak, or is it me?

[bajhn]

I tried writing a pretty simple Python client-server application that would pass small structures back and forth, and after seeing all the mention of freeing memory, I decided to take a look at memory usage over the life of the processes. The server process' working set and resident memory sizes grow with every transaction, so I started stripping down what I was sending until I was only sending a string of around 1 KB. Pretty soon I got down to something like this:

    for i in range(ITERATION_LIMIT):
        if count % ITERATION_REPORT == 0:
            report_memory(count)
        count += 1
        x = proxy.GetData('something')

And the method in the server proxy is this:

     def GetData(self, name: Str) -> Str:
        if self.count % ITERATION_REPORT == 0:
            report_memory(self.count)
        self.count += 1
        # return STATIC_STRING
        return '{}: data={}'.format(name, b64encode(urandom(1024)).decode('utf-8'))

The report_memory function just documents the memory stats from /proc every 500 passes, and this problem was demonstrable in ps before I added the function. The growth is about 240 bytes for each transaction.

My simple demonstration code is at https://github.com/bajhn/dasbus-demo. Thanks in advance for any insight.