Python high memory usage with BeautifulSoup

Question

I was trying to process several web pages with BeautifulSoup4 in python 2.7.3 but after every parse the memory usage goes up and up.

This simplified code produces th

Answer 1

Garbage collection is probably viable, but a context manager seems to handle it pretty well for me without any extra memory usage:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup
def parse():
  with open('testque.xml') as fh:
    page = soup(fh.read())

Also, though not entirely necessary, if you're using raw_input to let it loop while you test I actually find this idiom quite useful:

while not raw_input():
  parse()

It'll continue to loop every time you hit enter, but as soon as you enter any non-empty string it'll stop for you.