issues: 595882590

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association active_lock_reason draft pull_request body reactions performed_via_github_app state_reason repo type
595882590 MDU6SXNzdWU1OTU4ODI1OTA= 3948 Releasing memory? 3958036 closed 0     6 2020-04-07T13:49:07Z 2020-04-07T14:18:36Z 2020-04-07T14:18:36Z CONTRIBUTOR      

Once xarray (or dask) has loaded some array into memory, is there any way to force the memory to be released again? Or should this never be necessary?

For example, what would be the best workflow for this case: I have several large arrays on disk. Each will fit into memory individually. I want to do some analysis on each array (which produces small results), and keep the results in memory, but I do not need the large arrays any more after the analysis.

I'm wondering if some sort of release() method would be useful, so that I could say explicitly "can drop this DataArray from memory, even though the user might have modified it". My proposed workflow for the case above would then be something like: ``` da1 = ds["variable1"] result1 = do_some_work(da1) # may load large parts of da1 into memory da1.release() # any changes to da1 not already saved to disk are lost, but do not want da1 any more

da2 = ds["variable2"] result2 = do_some_work(da2) # may load large parts of da2 into memory da2.release() # any changes to da2 not already saved to disk are lost, but do not want da1 any more

... etc. ```

 
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