New submission from Bruce Frederiksen: The Example in the readline documentation (section 6.7 of the Library Reference) shows how to save your readline history in a file, and restore it each time you start Python. The problem with the Example is that it does not include a call to readline.set_history_length and the default is -1 (infinite). As a Python developer, I start Python quite a lot and had a .python_history file that was 850M bytes. Just starting Python was causing my system to thrash before the first prompt (>>>) even appeared. I suggest adding the following line to the example to avoid this: readline.set_history_length(1000) I'm not sure how far back this goes in terms of earlier versions of Python, but probably quite far. ---------- assignee: docs@python components: Documentation messages: 257325 nosy: dangyogi, docs@python priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: readline example eventually consumes all memory type: resource usage versions: Python 3.4 _______________________________________ Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue25991> _______________________________________