From df47d09929ef4f13e94e337da165d1f1f113c0ba Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: MeeseeksMachine <39504233+meeseeksmachine@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2022 01:04:11 -0800
Subject: [PATCH] Backport PR #45489: Bug tojson memleak (#45545)

Co-authored-by: vernetya <52132110+vernetya@users.noreply.github.com>
---
 doc/source/whatsnew/v1.4.0.rst            | 1 +
 pandas/_libs/src/ujson/python/objToJSON.c | 1 +
 2 files changed, 2 insertions(+)

diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.4.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.4.0.rst
index 327432de0a3f7..363d4b57544a9 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.4.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.4.0.rst
@@ -966,6 +966,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in :func:`read_json` raising ``ValueError`` when attempting to parse json strings containing "://" (:issue:`36271`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` when ``engine="c"`` and ``encoding_errors=None`` which caused a segfault (:issue:`45180`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` an invalid value of ``usecols`` leading to an unclosed file handle (:issue:`45384`)
+- Bug in :meth:`DataFrame.to_json` fix memory leak (:issue:`43877`)
 
 Period
 ^^^^^^
diff --git a/pandas/_libs/src/ujson/python/objToJSON.c b/pandas/_libs/src/ujson/python/objToJSON.c
index 06c3d823f72d2..c4609992342c3 100644
--- a/pandas/_libs/src/ujson/python/objToJSON.c
+++ b/pandas/_libs/src/ujson/python/objToJSON.c
@@ -228,6 +228,7 @@ static PyObject *get_values(PyObject *obj) {
             PyErr_Clear();
         } else if (PyObject_HasAttrString(values, "__array__")) {
             // We may have gotten a Categorical or Sparse array so call np.array
+            Py_DECREF(values);
             values = PyObject_CallMethod(values, "__array__", NULL);
         } else if (!PyArray_CheckExact(values)) {
             // Didn't get a numpy array, so keep trying