Last Updated: 2024-11-21

I ran out of GPU memory on a Jupyter notebook on a server after getting some exceptions. The garbage collector could not get rid of it. I had to rerun the whole notebook, which took ages, it being ML.

It turns out that the issue was Python was keeping the last exception around, which had a reference to a massive pytorch dataset. Instead of restarting, I could have gotten rid of this by raising a new exception, one with a negligible footprint:

1/0

Lessons

Exceptions can take up huge amounts of RAM. The easiest way to kill that reference is to raise a new exception.