Is it possible for a single process running a 32bit compiled version of python in Snow Leopard (64bit machine) to appear to consume > 4gb (say 5.4gb) of virtual memory as seen by the top command?
I did a file ...python
to see that the binary was not x86, yet it appeared to be consuming over 5gb of memory.
My guess is that the libraries that were used (RPy) were 'mmap'ing chunks of data, and the in-memory cache was appearing under the memory footprint of my process.
Or maybe I haven't verified that the Python binaries were 32bit. Or maybe there's some 32bit/64bit commingling going (libffi?).
Totally confused.