64 bit Python

[Mathias Waack]

Hi, 

one of my colleagues got some trouble with a program handling large
amounts of data. I figured out that a 32 bit application on HP-UX
cannot address more than 1 GB of memory. In fact (I think due to the
overhead of memory management done by python) a python application
cannot use much more than 500 MB of "real" data. For this reason
I've created a 64 bit version of python 2.3.5. I've tested a simple
C program before to make sure its able to address the whole
available memory (8 GB main memory and about 12 GB swap). The simple
example in C works, but the python script didn't. I was able to
create only 2 GB of python objects. The application occupied
approximately 2.2 GB of memory. After that, python failed with a
memory error. 

Is there any internal restriction on the size of the heap? 

Mathias