---
title: Memory Management
teaser: Managing Memory for persistent services
version: 3.8
menu:
  - ['Memory Zones', 'memoryzones']
  - ['Clearing Doc attributes', 'doc-attrs']
---

spaCy maintains a few internal caches that improve speed,
but cause memory to increase slightly over time. If you're
running a batch process that you don't need to be long-lived,
the increase in memory usage generally isn't a problem.
However, if you're running spaCy inside a web service, you'll
often want spaCy's memory usage to stay consistent. Transformer
models can also run into memory problems sometimes, especially when
used on a GPU.

## Memory zones {id="memoryzones"}

You can tell spaCy to free data from its internal caches (especially the
[`Vocab`](/api/vocab)) using the [`Language.memory_zone`](/api/language#memory_zone) context manager. Enter
the contextmanager and process your text within it, and spaCy will
**reset its internal caches** (freeing up the associated memory) at the
end of the block. spaCy objects created inside the memory zone must
not be accessed once the memory zone is finished.

```python
### Using memory zones
from collections import Counter

def count_words(nlp, texts):
    counts = Counter()
    with nlp.memory_zone():
        for doc in nlp.pipe(texts):
            for token in doc:
                counts[token.text] += 1
    return counts
```

<Infobox title="Important note" variant="warning">

Exiting the memory-zone invalidates all `Doc`, `Token`, `Span` and `Lexeme`
objects that were created within it. If you access these objects
after the memory zone exits, you may encounter a segmentation fault
due to invalid memory access.

</Infobox>

spaCy needs the memory zone contextmanager because the processing pipeline
can't keep track of which [`Doc`](/api/doc) objects are referring to data in the shared
[`Vocab`](/api/vocab) cache. For instance, when spaCy encounters a new word, a new [`Lexeme`](/api/lexeme)
entry is stored in the `Vocab`, and the `Doc` object points to this shared
data. When the `Doc` goes out of scope, the `Vocab` has no way of knowing that
this `Lexeme` is no longer in use.

The memory zone solves this problem by
allowing you to tell the processing pipeline that all data created
between two points is no longer in use. It is up to the you to honor
this agreement. If you access objects that are supposed to no longer be in
use, you may encounter a segmentation fault due to invalid memory access.

A common use case for memory zones will be **within a web service**. The processing
pipeline can be loaded once, either as a context variable or a global, and each
request can be handled within a memory zone:

```python
### Memory zones with FastAPI {highlight="10,23"}
from fastapi import FastAPI, APIRouter, Depends, Request
import spacy
from spacy.language import Language

router = APIRouter()


def make_app():
    app = FastAPI()
    app.state.NLP = spacy.load("en_core_web_sm")
    app.include_router(router)
    return app


def get_nlp(request: Request) -> Language:
    return request.app.state.NLP


@router.post("/parse")
def parse_texts(
    *, text_batch: list[str], nlp: Language = Depends(get_nlp)
) -> list[dict]:
    with nlp.memory_zone():
        # Put the spaCy call within a separate function, so we can't
        # leak the Doc objects outside the scope of the memory zone.
        output = _process_text(nlp, text_batch)
    return output


def _process_text(nlp: Language, texts: list[str]) -> list[dict]:
    # Call spaCy, and transform the output into our own data
    # structures. This function is called from inside a memory
    # zone, so must not return the spaCy objects.
    docs = list(nlp.pipe(texts))
    return [
        {
            "tokens": [{"text": t.text} for t in doc],
            "entities": [
                {"start": e.start, "end": e.end, "label": e.label_} for e in doc.ents
            ],
        }
        for doc in docs
    ]


app = make_app()
```

## Clearing transformer tensors and other Doc attributes {id="doc-attrs"}

The [`Transformer`](/api/transformer) and [`Tok2Vec`](/api/tok2vec) components set intermediate values onto the `Doc`
object during parsing. This can cause GPU memory to be exhausted if many `Doc`
objects are kept in memory together.

To resolve this, you can add the [`doc_cleaner`](/api/pipeline-functions#doc_cleaner) component to your pipeline. By default
this will clean up the [`Doc._.trf_data`](/api/transformer#custom_attributes) extension attribute and the [`Doc.tensor`](/api/doc#attributes) attribute.
You can have it clean up other intermediate extension attributes you use in custom
pipeline components as well.

```python
### Adding the doc_cleaner
nlp.add_pipe("doc_cleaner", config={"attrs": {"tensor": None}})
```