Andy Watson wrote: > > Why do you want that? And no, it is not possible. And to be honest: > I have >> no idea why e.g. the JVM allows for this. > > The reason why is simply that I know roughly how much memory I'm going > to need, and cpython seems to be taking a fair amount of time > extending its heap as I read in content incrementally.
I'm not an expert in python malloc schemes, I know that _some_ things are heavily optimized, but I'm not aware that it does some clever self-management of heap in the general case. Which would be complicated in the presence of arbitrary C extensions anyway. However, I'm having doubts that your observation is correct. A simple python -m timeit -n 1 -r 1 "range(50000000)" 1 loops, best of 1: 2.38 sec per loop will create a python-process of half a gig ram - for a split-second - and I don't consider 2.38 seconds a fair amount of time for heap allocation. When I used a 4 times larger argument, my machine began swapping. THEN things became ugly - but I don't see how preallocation will help there... Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
