How to reduce the memory used by Pandas DataFrames
A script illustrating how the memory usage of a pandas DataFrame can be reduced through altering data types.
This post presents a working script for reducing pandas DataFrame memory usage. Others have explored this topic: see discussions on Stack Overflow and this detailed guide.
Reducing DataFrame memory helps when working with larger datasets or improving performance. A related challenge is extracting maximum data from databases or data warehouses—this article covers different approaches to loading large datasets with pandas.
The function below loads a DataFrame and examines each column to find whether a more memory-efficient data type can represent the existing data. It returns the optimized DataFrame.