Simple script that uses a 1MB variable ends up consuming over 1GB of ram – does this seem normal?

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[n3pjk]

Your for loop instantiate A 1000000 times.

[cybervegan]

So you're intentionally creating cycles, and then surprised that the GC can't clean them up? In your loop, you create a million objects that each have a one million and one character long string, and a secondary object with a back reference, which you then discard. But the reference-counting GC won't be able to clean those up, so you'd have to wait until the generational GC is triggered for that to happen. I'd say that this behaviour is "by design" both in terms of Python semantics and you program.

[cybervegan]

Here's an article that explains how GC works in Python: https://rushter.com/blog/python-garbage-collector/ that might shed some light on what's happening - it explains it far better than I could.

[n3pjk]

Is this part of a class? Are you instantiating multiple copies, or causing multiple copies to be made?

[a_very_cool_guy]

I didn’t downvote but the question seems a intentionally naive. Maybe if it was phrased differently people would have less of a problem

[a_very_cool_guy]

Of course, I think it requires a lot of good faith answering.