Eval Vs Json.loads Memory Consumption

I have a dictionary that I am writing to a file and then loading it again. The dictionary has some sets, so I have the option of either doing an eval() or json.dumps() with a custo

Solution 1:

Whether or not you should be using eval is really another question.

The primary reason eval takes more memory is the text is first compiled into a python expression (parsed, converted to byte code) and then evaluated.

Especially with large literals, python has a memory leak in the bytecode compiler. This issue talks about pyc compilation, but you'll also hit it with code compilation in eval.

json doesn't suffer from this because it's not converting your text into executable bytecode.