[Python-Dev] MemoryError... how much memory? (original) (raw)

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com exarkun at twistedmatrix.com
Wed Oct 27 23:08:53 CEST 2010

On 07:09 pm, facundobatista at gmail.com wrote:

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Benjamin Peterson <benjamin at python.org> wrote:

Isn't this usually when you do something like [None]*2**300? In that case, wouldn't you know how much memory you're requesting? It could happen on any malloc. It depends on how much you have free. Don't think on getting a MemoryError on a python you just opened in the console. Think about a server with a month of uptime, where you have all the memory fragmented, etc. Also, why is that useful? It helps to determine why we're having some Memory Errors on our long-lived server, how is the behaviour when that happens, etc.

But... If you allocated all of your memory to some garbage, and then a 5 byte string can't be allocated, you don't really care about the 5 byte string, you care about the garbage that's wasting your memory.

Tools like heapy will give you a lot of information. Maybe it wouldn't hurt anyone to have more information in a MemoryError. But I don't think it's going to help a lot either. It's not the information that you're really interested in.

Jean-Paul

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