ggreg / memory_profiler

Monitor Memory usage of Python code

Memory Profiler

This is a python module for monitoring memory consumption of a process as well as line-by-line analysis of memory consumption for python programs.

It's a pure python module and has the psutil module as optional (but highly recommended) dependencies.

Installation

To install through easy_install or pip:

$ easy_install -U memory_profiler # pip install -U memory_profiler

To install from source, download the package, extract and type:

$ python setup.py install

Usage

The line-by-line profiler is used much in the same way of the line_profiler: you must first decorate the function you would like to profile with @profile. In this example, we create a simple function my_func that allocates lists a, b and then deletes b:

@profile
def my_func():
    a = [1] * (10 ** 6)
    b = [2] * (2 * 10 ** 7)
    del b
    return a

if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_func()

Execute the code passing the option -m memory_profiler to the python interpreter to load the memory_profiler module and print to stdout the line-by-line analysis. If the file name was example.py, this would result in:

$ python -m memory_profiler example.py

Output will follow:

Line #    Mem usage  Increment   Line Contents
==============================================
     3                           @profile
     4      5.97 MB    0.00 MB   def my_func():
     5     13.61 MB    7.64 MB       a = [1] * (10 ** 6)
     6    166.20 MB  152.59 MB       b = [2] * (2 * 10 ** 7)
     7     13.61 MB -152.59 MB       del b
     8     13.61 MB    0.00 MB       return a

The first column represents the line number of the code that has been profiled, the second column (Mem usage) the memory usage of the Python interpreter after that line has been executed. The third column (Increment) represents the difference in memory of the current line with respect to the last one. The last column (Line Contents) prints the code that has been profiled.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: How accurate are the results ?
• A: This module gets the memory consumption by querying the operating system kernel about the ammount of memory the current process has allocated, which might be slightly different from the ammount of memory that is actually used by the Python interpreter. For this reason, the output is only an approximation, and might vary between runs.
• Q: Does it work under windows ?
• A: Yes, but you will need the psutil module.

Support, bugs & wish list

For support, please ask your question on stack overflow and add the profiling tag. Send issues, proposals, etc. to github's issue tracker .

If you've got questions regarding development, you can email me directly at [email protected]

Development

Latest sources are available from github:

https://github.com/fabianp/memory_profiler

Authors

This module was written by Fabian Pedregosa inspired by Robert Kern's line profiler.

Tom added windows support and speed improvements via the psutil module.

Victor added python3, bugfixes and general cleanup.

License

Simplified BSD