Ceph

It looks to me very much like ctypes.string_at() allocates new memory for the string; in the case of xattrs, at least, that string memory was malloced in librados, and string_at without free means the librados copy is a leak.

Dan, ctypes.string_at() does allocate new memory chunk. but it is wrapped using a PyStringObject, like other PyObjects, it is refcounted, so presumably, it is also managed by the gc of python, or do you observe some visible leak when using the rados python binding?

string_at is no longer used since the conversion to cython.