Django: fixing a memory “leak” from Python 3.14’s incremental garbage collection

Back in February, I encountered an out-of-memory error while migrating a client project to Python 3.14. The issue occurred when running Django’s database migration command (migrate) on a limited-resource server, and seemed to be caused by the new incremental garbage collection algorithm in Python 3.14. At the time, I wrote a workaround and started on this blog post, but other tasks took priority and I never got around to finishing it. But four days ago, Hugo van Kemenade, the Python 3.14 release manager, announced that the new garbage collection algorithm will be reverted in Python 3.14.5, and the next Python 3.15 alpha release, due to reports of increased memory usage. Here’s the story of my workaround, as extra evidence that reverting incremental garbage collection is a good call. Python 3.14’s incremental garbage collection Python (well, CPython) has a garbage collector that runs regularly to clean up unreferenced objects. Most objects are cleaned up immediately when their…