20 Dec
2008
20 Dec
'08
11:25 p.m.
Steve Holden
I believe the OP engendered a certain amount of confusion by describing object deallocation as being performed by the garbage collector. So he perhaps didn't understand that even decref'ing all the objects only referenced by the dict will take a huge amount of time unless there's enough real memory to hold it.
He said he has 64GB RAM so I assume all his working set was in memory, not swapped out.