64 bit memory usage

[John Nagle]

On 12/8/2010 10:42 PM, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Dec 2010 14:44:30 +0000, Rob Randall<rob.randall2 at gmail.com>
> declaimed the following in gmane.comp.python.general:
>
>> I am trying to understand how much memory is available to a 64 bit python
>> process running under Windows XP 64 bit.
>>
>> When I run tests just creating a series of large dictionaries containing
>> string keys and float values I do not seem to be able to grow the process
>> beyond the amount of RAM present.

    If you get to the point where you need multi-gigabyte Python
dictionaries, you may be using the wrong tool for the job.
If it's simply that you need to manage a large amount of data,
that's what databases are for.

    If this is some super high performance application that needs to 
keep a big database in memory for performance reasons, CPython
is probably too slow.  For that, something like Google's BigTable
may be more appropriate, and will scale to terabytes if necessary.

				John Nagle