Find out how much memory is being used by an object in Python [duplicate] Find out how much memory is being used by an object in Python [duplicate] python python

Find out how much memory is being used by an object in Python [duplicate]


Try this:

sys.getsizeof(object)

getsizeof() Return the size of an object in bytes. It calls the object’s __sizeof__ method and adds an additional garbage collector overhead if the object is managed by the garbage collector.

A recursive recipe


There's no easy way to find out the memory size of a python object. One of the problems you may find is that Python objects - like lists and dicts - may have references to other python objects (in this case, what would your size be? The size containing the size of each object or not?). There are some pointers overhead and internal structures related to object types and garbage collection. Finally, some python objects have non-obvious behaviors. For instance, lists reserve space for more objects than they have, most of the time; dicts are even more complicated since they can operate in different ways (they have a different implementation for small number of keys and sometimes they over allocate entries).

There is a big chunk of code (and an updated big chunk of code) out there to try to best approximate the size of a python object in memory.

You may also want to check some old description about PyObject (the internal C struct that represents virtually all python objects).


I haven't any personal experience with either of the following, but a simple search for a "Python [memory] profiler" yield:

  • PySizer, "a memory profiler for Python," found at http://pysizer.8325.org/. However the page seems to indicate that the project hasn't been updated for a while, and refers to...

  • Heapy, "support[ing] debugging and optimization regarding memory related issues in Python programs," found at http://guppy-pe.sourceforge.net/#Heapy.

Hope that helps.