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I confirm the presence of a serious memory leak in ElementTree, using the iterparse() function.
Memory grows disproportionately to dozens of GB when parsing a large XML file.
For further information, see discussion in:
 http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/bugs/912164?do=post_view_threaded#912164
but notice that the comments attributing the problem to the OS are quite off the mark.
To replicate the problem, try this on a Wikipedia dump:
 iterparse = ElementTree.iterparse(file)
 id = None
 for event, elem in iterparse:
 if elem.tag.endswith("title"):
 title = elem.text
 elif elem.tag.endswith("id") and not id:
 id = elem.text
 elif elem.tag.endswith("text"):
 print id, title, elem.text[:20]