Reading a huge .csv file

I’m currently trying to read data from .csv files in Python 2.7 with up to 1 million rows, and 200 columns (files range from 100mb to 1.6gb). I can do this (very slowly) for the files with under 300,000 rows, but once I go above that I get memory errors. My code looks like this:

How to make separator in pandas read_csv more flexible wrt whitespace, for irregular separators?

I need to create a data frame by reading in data from a file, using read_csv method. However, the separators are not very regular: some columns are separated by tabs (t), other are separated by spaces. Moreover, some columns can be separated by 2 or 3 or more spaces or even by a combination of spaces and tabs (for example 3 spaces, two tabs and then 1 space).