Help with finding how much memory a variable is using

[Curtis Jensen]

Rich Somerfield wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am generating a huge, huge list of data (cant think of a decent way to
> reduce the required storage size and have it in a usable form).  Everytime i
> try to keep this list for future derivations I get a memory problem from
> Windows (effectively terminating my python script).
> 
> I presume this is because of the huge list.  Is it possible to find out the
> amount of memory a variable [not a type of the variable, the actual data
> contained within the variable] is taking up?  This variable is local to a
> class and it would appear that it is when i go out of scope of that class
> that the memory error is being issued.  Would I be better making this
> variable global (across all classes)? e.g. would this problem still happen
> if the variable was not just local to 1 class?
> 
> Would a different python datatype solve this problem for me ?
> 
> If I cant handle this amount of data then I will have to think of a way of
> better representing it, this will be unfortunate though as and compression /
> reduction of data will [as far as i can think] vastly reduce performance -
> which is already a concern.
> 
> Regards
> Rich

If your lists are numeric, you could use the Numeric module. 
Lists/arrays created by Numeric have a member function "itemsize()"
which corresponds to the number of bytes an individual element in that
array is using.  If your lists are not numeric, you might be able to
hack Numeric to give you memory usage (ie. you could use it to find
memory usage of lists of strings; anything more complicated than strings
and it could be difficult).

-- 
Curtis Jensen
cjensen at bioeng.ucsd.edu
http://www-bioeng.ucsd.edu/~cjensen/
FAX (425) 740-1451