Checking whether data frame is copy or view in Pandas

Question

Is there an easy way to check whether two data frames are different copies or views of the same underlying data that doesn\'t involve manipulations? I\'m trying to get a gri

Answer 1

You might trace the memory your pandas/python environment is consuming, and, on the assumption that a copy will utilise more memory than a view, be able to decide one way or another.

I believe there are libraries out there that will present the memory usage within the python environment itself - e.g. Heapy/Guppy.

There ought to be a metric you can apply that takes a baseline picture of memory usage prior to creating the object under inspection, then another picture afterwards. Comparison of the two memory maps (assuming nothing else has been created and we can isolate the change is due to the new object) should provide an idea of whether a view or copy has been produced.

We'd need to get an idea of the different memory profiles of each type of implementation, but some experimentation should yield results.