List limits
Nick Coghlan
ncoghlan at iinet.net.au
Tue Dec 21 05:33:17 EST 2004
Raymond Hettinger wrote:
>>How many items can be stored in a Python list? I have close to 70,000
>>items... is this within a lists limits?
>
>
> Lists store pointers to objects. Unless you have a lot of duplicates, it is the
> objects themselves that will consume most of your memory. The list itself will
> likely be small in comparison.
Given the size of the counter, is it actually physically possible for a list to
run out of room before the application runs out memory?
Even list(None for x in xrange(sys.maxint)) wouldn't do the trick, since each of
those pointers to None is taking 4 bytes of memory, and Python's internal
structures are already chewing up some of the address space.
Cheers,
Nick.
--
Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan at email.com | Brisbane, Australia
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