Talks

Processing large JSON files without running out of memory

Sunday, May 18th, 2025 1 p.m.–1:30 p.m. in Ballroom A

Presented by

Itamar Turner-Trauring

Experience Level:

Some experience

Description

If you need to process a large JSON file in Python, it’s very easy to run out of memory while loading the data, leading to a super-slow run time or out-of-memory crashes. If you're running in the cloud, you can get a machine with more memory, but that means higher costs. How can you process these large files without running out of memory?

In this talk you'll learn:

  • How to measure memory usage.
  • Some of the reasons why loading JSON uses so much memory.

Then, you'll learn some of the solutions to this problem:

  • Using a more efficient in-memory representation.
  • Only loading the subset of the data you need.
  • Streaming parsing, which can parse arbitrarily-large files with a fixed amount of memory.
  • Using a different file format, like JSON Lines.

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