Python dictionary eating up ram

Question

I'm pretty new to programming and made a program to fetch inventory data from Team Fortress 2 players and put the inventory items into a dictionary with the steamid as the key and the list of items as the value. The problem I'm running into is that after about 6000 entries into the dictionary the program has sucked up essentially all of the RAM on my system and shuts down. I'm guessing the dictionary simply becomes too large but by what I've read from similar questions a dict of 6000 entries shouldn't take up that much of my RAM. I've been looking into other solutions but I could use some concrete examples for my code. ``` import re, urllib.request, urllib.error, gzip, io, json, socket, sys with open("index_to_name.json", "r", encoding=("utf-8")) as fp: index_to_name=json.load(fp) with open("index_to_quality.json", "r", encoding=("utf-8")) as fp: index_to_quality=json.load(fp) with open("index_to_name_no_the.json", "r", encoding=("utf-8")) as fp: index_to_name_no_the=json.load(fp) wit…

Accepted Answer

I think you have some logic errors in your code. For instance, you're adding each player's inventory items to the `inventory` dictionary, then iterating over it to fill in other stuff.

However, you're never resetting the `inventory` dictionary, so it continues to accumulate items (so the second player will appear to have the first person's inventory in addition to their own).

You've got a similar issue with the `items` dictionary that you're using a bit later on. You reset it to `emptyitems` which was originally an empty list, but because assignment in Python is by reference, this has no effect (`items` was already the same object as `emptyitems`).

With those two fixes you may have a better chance at not using all your system's memory.

Another miscellaneous code improvement (probably not related to memory usage):

In your loop over `inventory`, you're repeatedly accessing the same two values and not using the `key` for anything. Instead of `for key in inventory` try `for value1, value2 in inventory.itervalues()` (or `in inventory.values()` if you're using Python 3). Then use `value1` in place of `inventory[key][0]` and `value2` in place of `inventory[key][1]` (or even better, give them more meaningful names).

Edit: Here's how the loop might look (I'm sort of guessing at names for the two values that were previously in `inventory[key][0]` and `inventory[key][1]`):

```
for quality, name in inventory.itervalues():
    try:
        if index_to_quality[str(quality)]=="":
            items.append(
                index_to_quality[str(quality)]
                +""+
                index_to_name[str(name)]
                )
        else:
            items.append(
                index_to_quality[str(quality)]
                +" "+
                index_to_name_no_the[str(name)]
                )
```

Python dictionary eating up ram

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