Sorry for the confusion, yes i do the yield from. The stdout stream for the process is actually producing data as it should. The subprocess produces a high amount of data (pbzip2), but is only consumed slowly. 

Normally when the buffer limit is reached for a stream reader, it calls pause_reading on the transport inside the feed_data method (see https://code.google.com/p/tulip/source/browse/asyncio/streams.py#365),
but here this is not happening, as the returned reader has no transport set (p.stdout._transport == None). So it fills up all the memory.