Pymalloc, a specialized object allocator written by Vladimir
Marangozov, was a feature added to Python 2.1. Pymalloc is
intended to be faster than the system malloc() and to have less
memory overhead for allocation patterns typical of Python
programs. The allocator uses C's malloc() function to get large
pools of memory and then fulfills smaller memory requests from
these pools. In 2.1 and 2.2, pymalloc was an experimental
feature and wasn't enabled by default; you had to explicitly
enable it when compiling Python by providing the --with-pymalloc
option to the configure script. In 2.3, pymalloc has had further
enhancements and is now enabled by default; you'll have to
supply --without-pymalloc to disable it. This change is
transparent to code written in Python; however, pymalloc may
expose bugs in C extensions. Authors of C extension modules
should test their code with pymalloc enabled, because some
incorrect code may cause core dumps at runtime. There's one
particularly common error that causes problems. The