64 bit memory usage

[Rob Randall]

I am trying to understand how much memory is available to a 64 bit python
process running under Windows XP 64 bit.

When I run tests just creating a series of large dictionaries containing
string keys and float values I do not seem to be able to grow the process
beyond the amount of RAM present.

For example, on a box with 2GB RAM and 3 GB pagefile the process stalls at
around 2GB.

On another machine with 16GB RAM and 24GB pagefile the process stalls at
16GB.

In other tests where a C++ program loads and runs the python DLL, if C++
based operations are performed the memory usage will grow to 40GB, but if
python is used to grab the memory it can still only grow to 16GB. With this
program if the memory usage is grown to over 16GB on the C++ side,
attempting to grab any from python crashes the process.

I was under the impression that python could grab as much memory as other
programs.

Can anyone tell me what is happening or where I may be going wrong?

Thanks,
Rob Randall
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