I'm working on an application using Python (3.4) and PyQt. The goal of the program is to manage and analyze large amount of data - up to ~50 binary files, which might be of total size up to 2-3 GB. When I tried to load a couple files into the program, it stops responding during loading and then takes ~1.5GB RAM just to keep running. My question is quite general - what are the possible methods in python/PyQt for handling such data sets?
You might consider the HDF5 format, which can access using h5py, pytables, or other python packages.  Depending on the dataformat, HDF5 could enable you to access the data on the HD in an efficient manner, which in practice means that you can save memory.  The downside is that it requires some effort on your side as a programmer.
Python - managing large data