What's the maximum size of a numpy array?
It is indeed related to the system maximum address length, to say it simply, 32-bit system or 64-bit system. Here is an explanation for these questions, originally from Mark Dickinson
Short answer: the Python object overhead is killing you. In Python 2.x on a 64-bit machine, a list of strings consumes 48 bytes per list entry even before accounting for the content of the strings. That's over 8.7 Gb of overhead for the size of array you describe. On a 32-bit machine it'll be a bit better: only 28 bytes per list entry.
Longer explanation: you should be aware that Python objects themselves can be quite large: even simple objects like ints, floats and strings. In your code you're ending up with a list of lists of strings. On my (64-bit) machine, even an empty string object takes up 40 bytes, and to that you need to add 8 bytes for the list pointer that's pointing to this string object in memory. So that's already 48 bytes per entry, or around 8.7 Gb. Given that Python allocates memory in multiples of 8 bytes at a time, and that your strings are almost certainly non-empty, you're actually looking at 56 or 64 bytes (I don't know how long your strings are) per entry.
Possible solutions:
(1) You might do (a little) better by converting your entries from strings to ints or floats as appropriate.
(2) You'd do much better by either using Python's array type (not the same as list!) or by using numpy: then your ints or floats would only take 4 or 8 bytes each.
Since Python 2.6, you can get basic information about object sizes with the sys.getsizeof function. Note that if you apply it to a list (or other container) then the returned size doesn't include the size of the contained list objects; only of the structure used to hold those objects. Here are some values on my machine.
I'm trying to create a matrix containing 2 708 000 000 elements. When I try to create a numpy array of this size it gives me a value error. Is there any way I can increase the maximum array size?
a=np.arange(2708000000)
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
ValueError: Maximum allowed size exceeded