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64 bit Python

Mathias Waack M.Waack at gmx.de
Mon Feb 14 16:25:45 EST 2005 
Ivan Voras wrote:

> Mathias Waack wrote:
>> amounts of data. I figured out that a 32 bit application on HP-UX
>> cannot address more than 1 GB of memory. In fact (I think due to
>> the overhead of memory management done by python) a python
>> application cannot use much more than 500 MB of "real" data. For
>> this reason
> 
> I don't thik this is likely. Don't know about HP-UX but on some
> platforms, FreeBSD for example, there is a soft memory-cap for
> applications. By default, a single application on FreeBSD cannot
> use more than 512MB of memory, period. The limit can be modified by
> root (probably involves rebooting).

As I stated I wrote a simple C-program before. The c-program was able
to allocate a bit more than 900MB in 32 bit mode. 

My python script allocates a bunch of strings each of 1024 characters
and writes it in a cStringIO. And it fails after writing 512K of
strings. Don't know how python restricts the heap size - but I'm
fairly sure its not a restriction of the OS. 

But thats not the point, I don't want to talk about one or two
megabytes - I'm just missing some GB of heap;)

Mathias
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