[Tutor] Memory problem

[Alan Gauld]

> > I assume you tried the simple del() function to mark it for gc?
>
> Wether or not this actually frees up memory will depend on what OS
the
> program runs on. On some unix systems, once the memory has been
allocated
> to a process, the kernel might not try to reclaim it.

This is true but regular use of del() ensures that memory growth is
limited to the minimum needed.

However the best solution is to not grab all the memory at once.
Think of the days when mainframe computers had 4 Kilobytes of RAM,
and they processed the US national census with them? They used
techniques which processed the minimum data set in RAM at a time
and wrote intermediate results to backing store. We may need to
try the same kind of trick here (but using more than 4K of course!).

Alan G.