PC locks up with list operations

[Peter Otten]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> Twice in a couple of weeks, I have locked up my PC by running a Python 2.5
> script that tries to create a list that is insanely too big.
> 
> In the first case, I (stupidly) did something like:
> 
> mylist = [0]*12345678901234
> 
> After leaving the machine for THREE DAYS (!!!) I eventually was able to
> get to a console and kill the Python process. Amazingly, it never raised
> MemoryError in that time.
> 
> The second time was a little less stupid, but not much:
> 
> mylist = []
> for x in itertools.combinations_with_replacement(some_big_list, 20):
>     mylist.append(func(x))
> 
> After three hours, the desktop is still locked up. I'm waiting to see what
> happens in the morning before rebooting.
> 
> Apart from "Then don't do that!", is there anything I can do to prevent
> this sort of thing in the future? Like instruct Python not to request more
> memory than my PC has?
> 
> 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?

If you are starting these scripts from the shell, how about ulimit?

$ ulimit -v 40000
$ python -c'print range(10**5)[-1]'
99999
$ python -c'print range(10**6)[-1]'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
MemoryError
$