How do I determine the size of an object in Python?

Question

I want to know how to get size of objects like a string, integer, etc. in Python.

Related question: How many bytes per element are there in a Python list (tuple)?

Answer 1

If you don't need the exact size of the object but roughly to know how big it is, one quick (and dirty) way is to let the program run, sleep for an extended period of time, and check the memory usage (ex: Mac's activity monitor) by this particular python process. This would be effective when you are trying to find the size of one single large object in a python process. For example, I recently wanted to check the memory usage of a new data structure and compare it with that of Python's set data structure. First I wrote the elements (words from a large public domain book) to a set, then checked the size of the process, and then did the same thing with the other data structure. I found out the Python process with a set is taking twice as much memory as the new data structure. Again, you wouldn't be able to exactly say the memory used by the process is equal to the size of the object. As the size of the object gets large, this becomes close as the memory consumed by the rest of the process becomes negligible compared to the size of the object you are trying to monitor.