[Python-Dev] tracemallocqt: GUI to analyze tracemalloc snapshots

[Victor Stinner]

Hi,

To prepare my conference on tracemalloc for Pycon Montréal next month,
I wrote a GUI to analyze tracemalloc snapshots: "tracemallocqt".
https://bitbucket.org/haypo/tracemallocqt

It looks like that:

   http://www.haypocalc.com/tmp/tracemallocqt_python34.png

I'm looking for testers and feedback on the GUI. You may be curious to
see which parts of Python is allocating the most memory, or maybe test
your favorite application to check if it leaks memory or how its
memory footprint can be reduced.

To run tracemallocqt, you have to install PySide and get tracemalloc
snapshots. It looks like most Linux distributions provide PySide
packages.

To take snapshots, see tracemalloc documentation:
http://docs.python.org/dev/library/tracemalloc.html

In short, use Python 3.4 with "-X tracemalloc=25" command line option
and then call:
---
import pickle, tracemalloc
snap = tracemalloc.take_snapshot()
with open("dump.pickle", "wb") as fp: pickle.dump(snap, fp, 2)
snap = None
---

It's more fun with at least 2 snapshots to compare them ;-)

I force pickle version 2 because tracemallocqt currently only works on
Python 2. (Mostly because I don't see how to get PySide for Python 3
on Fedora 20.)

Not all applications work on Python 3.4 right now, you can use the
pytracemalloc project which is tracemalloc for Python 2.5-3.3. Sorry,
you have to patch Python and recompile it. Here are instructions to
install a patched Python 2.7 with tracemalloc:
http://pytracemalloc.readthedocs.org/#manual-installation

If you don't want to take snapshot, you can compare these two files:

   http://www.haypocalc.com/tmp/python34_start.pickle
   http://www.haypocalc.com/tmp/python34_after_import.pickle

The source browser will not find Python source code, because the
snapshots contain absolute paths.

Victor