How does garbage collection happen in Python

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I am new to Python. I want to know how does the garbage collection algorithm work in Python?
Jul 12, 2019 in Python by Neel
• 3,020 points
892 views

1 answer to this question.

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The Garbage collection runs automatically as the program is under execution, sometimes, we might want to run the Garbage collection at a specific time. We can do this by calling collect() function. Let’s try to define a LinkedList class to demonstrate this:

class LinkedList(object):
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.next = None
    def set_next(self, next):
        print('Linking nodes %s.next = %s' % (self, next))
        self.next = next
    def __repr__(self):
        return '%s(%s)' % (self.__class__.__name__, self.name)

Once that is done, we can start constructing their objects and trigger Garbage collection manually:

# Constructing a circular LinkedList
a = LinkedList('1')
b = LinkedList('2')
c = LinkedList('3')
a.set_next(b)
b.set_next(c)
c.set_next(a)

# Remove references to the LinkedList nodes in this module's namespace
a = b = c = None

# Show the effect of garbage collection
for i in range(2):
    print('Collecting %d ...' % i)
    n = gc.collect()
    print('Unreachable objects:', n)
    print('Remaining Garbage:', pprint.pprint(gc.garbage))
    print

When we run this, the output will be:
python gc collect, python force garbage collection

In this example, the cyclic LinkedList objects are cleared as soon as garbage collection runs the first time.

answered Jul 12, 2019 by Arvind
• 3,050 points

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