My Python script crashed my whole computer last night

I was building a simple web scraper in VS Code. One wrong loop ate up 16GB of RAM and I had to hard reset. Anyone else brick their machine with a rookie mistake?

2 comments

2 Comments

olivia_morgan85d ago

Wait, was it a while loop without a break condition or did you just try to scrape an absurdly huge dataset in one go? I've accidentally loaded entire sites into memory before and it's wild how fast Python can eat all your resources. I'm curious if you actually saw the RAM usage climb or if it was just instant freeze.

patricia_hayes4d ago

Honest to god, I did the exact same thing last month with a web scraper. I had a while loop that was supposed to check for a "next page" button, but I forgot to add any conditional at all. My computer froze so hard the mouse stopped moving for a full 30 seconds before I could even hit the power button. It's scary how fast it happens too, like you don't even see the RAM climbing because it goes from normal to 100% in under a second. Really sorry you had to go through that, it's a total pain when you think you're being careful and then bam.