However, another possibility is the the regexp is consuming lots of memory.
The regexp seems simple enough (b'.'), so I doubt it is leaking memory like mad; I'm guessing you're just seeing the OS page in as much of the file as it can.
Yup. Windows will aggressively fill up your RAM in cases like this because after all why not? There's no use to having memory just sitting around unused. For read-only, non-anonymous mappings it's not much problem for the OS to drop pages that haven't been recently accessed and use them for something else. So I wouldn't be too worried about the process chewing up RAM.
I feel like this is veering more into python-list territory for further discussion though.
Last time I worked on windows, which admittedly was a long time, the file cache was not attributed to a process, so this doesn't seem to be relevant to this situation.
/ Anders