Support a new context manager method Language.memory_zone(), to allow long-running services to avoid growing memory usage from cached entries in the Vocab or StringStore. Once the memory zone block ends, spaCy will evict Vocab and StringStore entries that were added during the block, freeing up memory. Doc objects created inside a memory zone block should not be accessed outside the block.

The current implementation disables population of the tokenizer cache inside the memory zone, resulting in some performance impact. The performance difference will likely be negligible if you're running a full pipeline, but if you're only running the tokenizer, it'll be much slower. If this is a problem, you can mitigate it by warming the cache first, by processing the first few batches of text without creating a memory zone. Support for memory zones in the tokenizer will be added in a future update.

The Language.memory_zone() context manager also checks for a memory_zone() method on pipeline components, so that components can perform similar memory management if necessary. None of the built-in components currently require this.