I'm using Python 2.6 on a Mac Mini with 1GB RAM. I want to read in a huge text file

$ ls -l links.csv; file links.csv; tail links.csv 
-rw-r--r--  1 user  user  469904280 30 Nov 22:42 links.csv
links.csv: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
4757187,59883
4757187,99822
4757187,66546
4757187,638452
4757187,4627959
4757187,312826
4757187,6143
4757187,6141
4757187,3081726
4757187,58197

So each line in the file consists of a tuple of two comma separated integer values. I want to read in the whole file and sort it according to the second column. I know, that I could do the sorting without reading the whole file into memory. But I thought for a file of 500MB I should still be able to do it in memory since I have 1GB available.

However when I try to read in the file, Python seems to allocate a lot more memory than is needed by the file on disk. So even with 1GB of RAM I'm not able to read in the 500MB file into memory. My Python code for reading the file and printing some information about the memory consumption is:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys

infile=open("links.csv", "r")

edges=[]
count=0
#count the total number of lines in the file
for line in infile:
 count=count+1

total=count
print "Total number of lines: ",total

infile.seek(0)
count=0
for line in infile:
 edge=tuple(map(int,line.strip().split(",")))
 edges.append(edge)
 count=count+1
 # for every million lines print memory consumption
 if count%1000000==0:
  print "Position: ", edge
  print "Read ",float(count)/float(total)*100,"%."
  mem=sys.getsizeof(edges)
  for edge in edges:
   mem=mem+sys.getsizeof(edge)
   for node in edge:
    mem=mem+sys.getsizeof(node) 

  print "Memory (Bytes): ", mem

The output I got was:

Total number of lines:  30609720
Position:  (9745, 2994)
Read  3.26693612356 %.
Memory (Bytes):  64348736
Position:  (38857, 103574)
Read  6.53387224712 %.
Memory (Bytes):  128816320
Position:  (83609, 63498)
Read  9.80080837067 %.
Memory (Bytes):  192553000
Position:  (139692, 1078610)
Read  13.0677444942 %.
Memory (Bytes):  257873392
Position:  (205067, 153705)
Read  16.3346806178 %.
Memory (Bytes):  320107588
Position:  (283371, 253064)
Read  19.6016167413 %.
Memory (Bytes):  385448716
Position:  (354601, 377328)
Read  22.8685528649 %.
Memory (Bytes):  448629828
Position:  (441109, 3024112)
Read  26.1354889885 %.
Memory (Bytes):  512208580

Already after reading only 25% of the 500MB file, Python consumes 500MB. So it seem that storing the content of the file as a list of tuples of ints is not very memory efficient. Is there a better way to do it, so that I can read in my 500MB file into my 1GB of memory?