MemoryError on reading mbox file

[David]

>
> My system has 512M RAM and 768M swap, which seems to run out at an
> early stage of this. Is there a way to clean up memory for messages
> already processed?

It may be that Python's garbage collection isn't keeping up with your app.

You could try periodically forcing it to run. eg:

import gc
gc.collect()

You can also finetune the GC settings and check what is using up your memory.

More info here: http://docs.python.org/lib/module-gc.html