Out of memory while reading excel file

[Peter Otten]

Mahmood Naderan via Python-list wrote:

> Well actually cells are treated as strings and not integer or float
> numbers.

May I ask why you are using numpy when you are dealing with strings? If you 
provide a few details about what you are trying to achieve someone may be 
able to suggest a workable approach.

Back-of-the-envelope considerations: 4GB / 5E6 cells amounts to

>>> 2**32 / (100000 * 50)
858.9934592

about 850 bytes per cell, with an overhead of

>>> sys.getsizeof("")
49

that would be 800 ascii chars, down to 200 chars in the worst case. If your 
strings are much smaller the problem lies elsewhere.