libmesh

[ghreat]

Have you looked at libmesh?

Mesh is a drop in replacement for malloc(3) that can transparently recover from memory fragmentation without any changes to application code.

I recently saw the talk and immediately though it might be interesting to see if it is beneficial for speeding up python (or at least make it more efficient).

I was impressed by the presented results, such as 17% heap reduction for firefox with <1% performance overhead. They also show nice results for redis and ruby.

Technically it'll run slower since the memory compaction adds a small overhead, but more memory available for other things might make a difference depending on the application.