Comment by ajross
3 months ago
> load up the file
I/O is done piecewise, a line at a time. The file is never "loaded up". Again you're applying an intuition about how parsers are presented to college students (suck it all into RAM and build a big in-memory representation of the syntax tree) that doesn't match the way actual config file parsers work (read a line and interpret it, then read another).
I didn't mean it in a way that "all of the file is loaded into memory", just the parts you are always processing at the time (e.g. as you said line wise), which either way result in the same memory usage from the file being loaded.