Summarizing memory use

[pacquets at newsguy.com]

I asked a question a few days ago about "reduced memory Python," and got a good
answer back on "Pippy without the PalmOS dependencies."  Thanks for that one; 
I've been making good progress with that.

There was a second part to the message which no one addressed, though, so I'd
like to ask that again:

***  how can I get a summary of what is consuming memory and how much they're
using, in a running interpreter?  Has anyone done such a script?

Using one of the scripts for "detecting memory leaks" I was able to get
reference counts for all the objects, and it breaks them down by the Type of
each one (string, list, etc.)   But this isn't really too helpful -- what I want
is some sort of "charge back" to the top-level objects.  I realize this is
impossible in the general case of an object graph, but if all I do is

import os
os.listdir('.')

I ought to be able to see where the 850K of memory was going, somehow or other.
Any ideas on that?