Bernardo Sulzbach's Website

Getting the Size of an Object in Python

2015-11-22

Recently, I found myself wondering how much memory a Python list I had in my environment was using. So I searched and found the following very handy function for the curious minds or desperate debuggers.

sys.getsizeof(object[, default])

  Return the size of an object in bytes. The object can be any type of
  object. All built-in objects will return correct results, but this does
  not have to hold true for third-party extensions as it is implementation
  specific.

  Only the memory consumption directly attributed to the object is
  accounted for, not the memory consumption of objects it refers to.

  If given, default will be returned if the object does not provide means
  to retrieve the size. Otherwise a TypeError will be raised.

  getsizeof() calls the object's __sizeof__ method and adds an additional
  garbage collector overhead if the object is managed by the garbage
  collector.

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