So - just invoking an error in the ipython command line has freed up 300 MB. Where did they come from? I tried different things - assigning other variables doesn't seem to free up this memory. Neither do calls to other functions. Except "plot()", which does seem to do the trick for some reason. Interestingly, when I run all this in a python interactive session (and not ipython), I get a similar memory usage initially. Calling a non-existent variable does not free up the memory, but other things do. For example, import matplotlib.pylab into the namespace did the trick. Does anyone have any idea what is going on?
It is probably just the garbage collector being invoked. If you invoke it manually, does it always free memory? e.g.: import gc gc.collect() Xavier Saint-Mleux