Size of an object in memory?

[Michael Hudson]

Fernando Pérez <fperez528 at yahoo.com> writes:

> Is there any way (at runtime, dynamically) to obtain the size in
> bytes of a given object in memory? 

Didn't we do this a few days ago?  See this thread:

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=_6FG7.33159%24i4.5175661%40news0.telusplanet.net&rnum=1

but, in short, no, and you don't really want to know.

> Since multiple names may be bound to the same object, is it possible
> to obtain the size of the underlying object and a list of all other
> names bound to it?

Not easily.  Or maybe not at all.  Oh, hang on: see gc.get_referents.
This may be new in Python 2.2, though.

> I'm writing a runtime object inspector, using the very nice inspect
> module, but inspect doesn't seem to provide this kind of
> information.

It's not obvious (to me) that the information returned by
gc.get_referents will be useful, but it may be.  Maybe it should be
used in inspect?

Cheers,
M.

-- 
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