string copying

[Chris Barker]

Tim Peters wrote:
> Does python run out of memory
> gracefully?
> 
> Very.  You should get a clean MemoryError exception if you try.

Perhpas so, but with VM, you can really slow your system to a crawl
before running out of memory. I'm running Linux, and when I do something
silly that caused Python to need a lot of memory, it's quite impressive
how unresponsive my system gets. 120MB on a sytem with 128MB physical
memory is pretty darn bad, over 128 MB, and things REALLY slow down! If
I didn't know better, I'd think I had crashed teh machine. I have always
been able to telnet in from somewhere else and shut down the process if
I was really patient. The console was totally unresponsive. Is there no
way to restrict the memory usage of a process on NT? it's a safer way to
test these things.

-Chris


-- 
Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov