[Python-Dev] under what circumstances can python still exhibit "high water mark" memory usage?

[Stefan Ring]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> I'm having trouble with some python processes that are using 3GB+ of memory
> but when I inspect them with either heapy or meliae, injected via pyrasite,
> those tools only report total memory usage to be 119Mb.
>
> This feels like the old "python high water mark" problem, but I thought that
> was fixed in 2.6/3.0?
> Under what circumstances can a Python process still exhibit high memory
> usage that tools like heapy don't know about?

Which Python version are you experiencing this with? I know that in
Python 2.7, having many floats (and I think also ints) active at once
creates a high water situation. Python 2.7 is what I have experience
with -- with heap sizes around 40 GB sometimes.