readlines() with large file raises: IOError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory

[nicogrubert at arcor.de]

Hi there
 
I am trying to read the content of a really large text file (1GByte) and I get
the following exception if I try to call readlines() on the opened textfile:

    IOError: [Errno 12] Cannot allocate memory


This is my code:
INFILE="/home/myuser/myfile"
open_infile = open( INFILE, 'r' )
lines = open_infile.readlines()


Any idea whats going on there?
Does pyhon tries to put the content into machine's RAM (512 MB) which is not big enough so an
exception is raised?

Thanks in advance,
Nico

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