getting the size of an object

[Lenard Lindstrom]

filox wrote:
> "Brett Hoerner" <bretthoerner at bretthoerner.com> wrote in message 
> news:1182182932.947333.251020 at o61g2000hsh.googlegroups.com...
>> On Jun 18, 11:07 am, "filox" <filox_realmmakni... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> is there a way to find out the size of an object in Python? e.g., how 
>>> could
>>> i get the size of a list or a tuple?
>> "Size" can mean a lot of things,
>>
>> len(my_list)
>> len(my_tuple)
>>
>> Although I have the feeling you mean "how many bytes does this object
>> take in memory" - and I believe the short answer is no.
>>
> 
> is there a long answer? what i want is to find out the number of bytes the 
> object takes up in memory (during runtime). since python has a lot of 
> introspection mechanisms i thought that should be no problem...
> 
> 

New-style classes have both a __basicsize__ and an __itemsize__ 
attribute. __basicsize__ gives the number of bytes in the fixed size 
portion of an instance. For immutable types with variable size, such as 
tuple and str, multiply __itemsize__ by the object length and add to 
__basicsize__ to get the instance size. long type instances also vary in 
length, but since long has no length property trying to figure out the 
size of a particular instance is harder. And types like list, map and 
unicode keep pointers to blocks of memory allocated separately.


--
Lenard Lindstrom
<len-l at telus.net>