Python does not take up available physical memory

[Barry Scott]

On 21 Oct 2012, at 15:14, Pradipto Banerjee <pradipto.banerjee at adainvestments.com> wrote:

> I tried this on a different PC with 12 GB RAM. As expected, this time, reading the data was no issue. I noticed that for large files, Python takes up 2.5x size in memory compared to size on disk, for the case when each line in the file is retained as a string within a Python list. As an anecdote, for MATLAB, the similar overhead is 2x, slightly lower than Python, and each line in the file was retained as string within a MATLAB cell. I'm curious, has any one compared the overhead of data in memory for other languages like for instance Ruby?
> 
Python 3.3 has changes to make string storage more efficient. See the whats new page.
http://docs.python.org/py3k/whatsnew/3.3.html "more compact unicode strings".

Barry
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