Heap Memory

[Gregory Piñero]

On 11/16/06, Fredrik Lundh <fredrik at pythonware.com> wrote:
> what are you guys talking about?  there are no artificial memory
> limitations in Python; a Python process simply uses all the memory it
> can get from the operating system.

I wish I could easily reproduce one of these errors I'm thinking of.
The last time it happened to me, I was pulling about 400,000 records
(10 fields) out of a database table and putting it into a list of
lists.  I then attempted to pickle the resulting huge list to disk and
I just got a big MemoryError.  A similiar thing happened when trying
to write the list to disk using the csv module.

This computer it was running on has 2GB of RAM and 6GB of virtual
memory so I really doubt I had used up all of that memory.  I didn't
watch it the whole time so I can't be sure though.  Any ideas what
could have been going on there?

-Greg