mmap caching

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Nick Craig-Wood schrieb:
> So presumably it is python generating a MemoryError.  It is asking for
> a new bit of memory and it is failing so it throws a MemoryError.
> 
> Could memory allocation under windows be affected by a large chunk of
> mmap()ed file which is physically swapped in at the time of the
> allocation?

To my knowledge, no. There might be virtual memory quotas, but I don't
think Windows supports such a concept.

More likely, this is entirely unrelated to the mmap issue. I would
guess that the machine on which the problem occurs is close to
exhausting its swap file (because of other activities in the system),
so Python occasionally manages to exhaust the swap file, through
regular allocations (memory-mapped files don't contribute to
swap file usage, as they have their own disk-backing, namely in the
file being mapped).

Regards,
Martin