Optimizing Python CSV parsing for memory-constrained environments (Bypassing the "Object Tax")

12 hours ago 1
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I'm working with large CSV datasets (10M+ rows, ~400MB-1GB) on low-resource cloud instances (1GB-2GB RAM). Standard pandas.read_csv is causing MemoryError because the "Object Tax" (wrapping every value in a Python object) bloats the memory usage to 3x-4x the file size.

Even using chunksize doesn't help with the processing latency, which is sitting around 10-12 seconds for basic aggregations.

Are there proven ways to bypass the Python heap entirely and process raw CSV data closer to the metal to reduce RAM overhead?

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