PC locks up with list operations

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 8:40 AM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 31/08/2011 13:33, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>>
>> I am using Linux desktops; both incidents were with Python 2.5. Do newer
>> versions of Python respond to this sort of situation more gracefully?
>
> Ironically, Windows does better here and dumps you out with a MemoryError before slowly recovering.
>
> Linux seems to fair badly when programs use more memory than physically available. Perhaps there's some per-process thing that can be used to limit things on Linux?
>
> cheers,
>
> Chris
>
> --

32-bit or 64-bit Python? A 32-bit program will crash once memory hits
2GB. A 64-bit program will just keep consuming RAM until your computer
starts thrashing. The problem isn't your program using more RAM than
you have, just more RAM than you have free. Last time I faced a
situation like this, I just decided it was better to stick to the
32-bit program and let it crash if it got too big.


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>            - http://www.simplistix.co.uk
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