Python memory hack

Django and most of python frameworks eat a lot of RAM. To serve multiple pages in the same time there must be many running python processes (this is not like light www daemons which serve all requests from only one process, like lighttpd or nginx).

So every python process eats RAM. During it's live it imports many libraries and files. This imports are never freed by garbage collector. This imports are almost identical for every process, but the problem is that they are not shared between processes. If you import some library in django, it's going to be imported separately at every django process.

To reduce memory usage it's possible to import all used libraries actually before forking the python processes. Linux fork() uses copy-on-write technique, so we can think that preloaded libraries are going to be shared between python processes.

Unfortunately in python it doesn't work. That's because immutable and mutable data are stored in the same memory segment! For example header structure for immutable string is being often changed, because it contains reference counter.

I created quick memory hack for cpython. Python imports are mostly code objects, which contain code in string objects. I hacked string object, so that it allocates memory for immutable data in separate memory segment than mutable part. My hack allocates big memory segment in which immutable string data is stored. Except for storing new strings, that memory is not going to be changed during execution. I hope, that after fork(2), this memory segment will be successfully shared between threads. The bad side is that this memory is never freed.

Example usage:

x.py:
'a'.setmajekhack()   # enable hack
# do some imports here
import sys,os,time
'a'.setmajekhack()   # disable hack

Simple output, this time only 17KB of strings data were put to immutable segment:

MAJEKHACK enabled 0x2b6bc0c57000
MAJEKHACK disabled, allocated 17131 bytes

Unfortunately this hack doesn't give as good results as I thought. Although I think that python memory allocator could be highly optimized for similar cases and save our precious memory.