I found that I can make my machine spike in memory usage with just this:

importmatplotlib.pyplotaspltfrommatplotlib.tickerimportMultipleLocatorfig,ax=plt.subplots()ax.set_yscale('log')ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(MultipleLocator(100))plt.savefig('test.png')

When I say huge, I mean I see memory usage go up and I kill it before I end up with an unresponsive system.

Removing either of the log scaling or theMultipleLocator causes the huge memory spike to disappear.