On Jan 8, 2014 5:51 PM, "Keith Winston" <keithw...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Well, thanks everyone. I get the picture. And there's nothing subtle going on here: I'm playing around, trying to factor million-digit numbers and the like. No biggie, this was interesting.
Million digit numbers will use up some memory. Perhaps a megabyte per number. If you just hold one in memory and try to factor it then it shouldn't lead to the problems you described. Or are you holding a list of many million digit numbers? Or are they several hundred million digits? The garbage collector has nothing to do with the memory usage of immutable types like ints. There are deallocated instantly when the last reference you hold is cleared (in CPython). So if you run out of memory because of them then it is because you're keeping them alive in your own code. Running the garbage collector with gc.collect cannot help with that. Oscar
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