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

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Thu Oct 28 15:39:12 CEST 2010

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 11:14 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

Furthermore, our server is fairly complex: we're using quite some libraries to do different jobs, and one of the approaches (not the only one) that we're taking to deal with this beast is to analyze its memory-related behaviour from an external POV (thinking it as a black box).

So, beyond it's arguable utility, do you think that having that information could harm us in some way? I think implementing it might do harm. When a memory error is raised, you are typically out of memory, so allocating more memory might fail (it just did). Therefore, allocating more objects or doing string formatting will likely fail (unless the requested size is much larger than the memory required for these operations). So the chance increases that you trigger a fatal error.

What Martin describes here is a more explicit description of what I meant by "practical implementation problems" and "special cases when raising MemoryError". However, I think thresholding the additional error formatting to only kick in the requested amount of memory exceeds a certain size would be an adequate safeguard without reducing the utility in Facundo's use case (the pre-allocated instance can have a generic error message saying an allocation of less than the threshold value failed).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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