memory saving in Python

[Skaperen]

i am creating a script intended to fetch some large sets of data. this script is intended for public use. but it is very heavy on memory usage. part of this seems to be that underlying tools work with bulk data. that is they provide or expect all the data in one big list rather than work with a little at a time. i'm looking around for coding techniques to minimize memory use, such as sort() to sort in place instead of sorted() which makes a 2nd copy before the 1st is deleted. some argument combinations have used upwards of 12 GBs of memory. got any nice links?