64 bit memory usage

Rob Randall rob.randall2 at gmail.com
Fri Dec 10 08:54:42 EST 2010


You guys are right. If I disable the gc it will use all the virtual RAM in
my test.

The application I have been running these tests for is a port of a program
written in a LISP-based tool running on Unix.
It does a mass of stress calculations.

The port has been written using a python-based toolkit I am responsible for.
This toolkit offers much of the same functionlity as the LISP tool.
It is based around the use of demand-driven/declarative programming.

When the porting project started no one realised just how much memory the
heaviest of the test cases used.
It uses 40+ GB on an HP Unix machine.

It is easy to see now that the port should have been written differently,
but it is essentially complete now.

This has lead me to see if a hardware solution can be found using 64 bit
windows machnes.

I will try running one the tests next to see what impact disabling the gc
will have.

Thanks,
Rob.


On 9 December 2010 22:44, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:

> 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
>
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
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