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I assume you're running on Linux.  Python's implementation of 
recv asks the platform malloc for a buffer of the size 
requested, and raises an exception if malloc returns NULL.  
Unfortunately, malloc on Linux has a nasty habit of returning 
non-NULL even if there's no chance you can actually use the 
amount of memory requested.  There's really nothing Python 
can do about that.

So back to Jeremy's comment:  try the same thing in C.  If 
you get ridiculous behavior there too, it's a platform C/OS 
bug, and Python won't be able to hide it from you.