How can I explicitly free memory in Python?

Question

I wrote a Python program that acts on a large input file to create a few million objects representing triangles. The algorithm is:

1. read an input file

Answer 1

The del statement might be of use, but IIRC it isn't guaranteed to free the memory. The docs are here ... and a why it isn't released is here.

I have heard people on Linux and Unix-type systems forking a python process to do some work, getting results and then killing it.

This article has notes on the Python garbage collector, but I think lack of memory control is the downside to managed memory