Yes. The test doesn't run with more than the requested "units", but if you
run it without -M it does run with a very small number, in order to make
sure the tests don't bitrot.

The mechanism could do with an overhaul though; I wrote it in 2006 or so,
before we had test skipping and when memory limits were a lot lower (and we
had fewer, less powerful friends :) I also wonder if we should change it to
run each test in a separate process so we can more easily check the actual
memory usage.
On Apr 14, 2015 1:16 PM, "Joe Jevnik" <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

>
> Joe Jevnik added the comment:
>
> I think that the idea is not to get as close to the limit as possible but
> just to hard cap the memory usage of the test suite so that it doesn't get
> oom-killed. twouters, does this sound correct? Also, I think that this
> means that the new decorator is reporting a proper size hint.
>
> ----------
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> <http://bugs.python.org/issue5438>
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