Unknown screen output of manually installed Python 2.7

Question

I installed Python 2.7 today using:

./configure --prefix=/home/zhanwu/local --enable-shared --enable-profiling --with-pydebug
make install

Then I keep getting something like "[37745 refs]" on screen after each function call:

[zhanwu@cluster ~]$ ~/local/bin/python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jun 16 2011, 17:45:05) 
[GCC 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-44)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sys
[37745 refs]
>>> print 'test'
test
[37745 refs]
>>> sys.exit()
[18048 refs]
[zhanwu@cluster ~]$ 

What does those numbers mean? Anything wrong here and can I get rid of them?

uname -a result:

[zhanwu@cluster ~]$ uname -a
Linux cluster.xxx.xxx.xxx 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 #1 SMP Wed Jun 17 06:38:05 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Answer 1

You get these because you configured the build with --with-pydebug. They denote the number of references Python is currently keeping track of. To get rid of them, configure without --with-pydebug.