How to Profile Python Memory Usage
Explore memory_profiler, a useful Python profiler package for Python memory management, and other tools to help you avoid memory leaks and dumps in the future.
Feb 23, 2022 • 3 Minute Read
One of the ways Python makes development fast (not to mention easier than languages like C and C++) is Python memory management. In Python, it’s simple because the language handles memory management for you. However, this doesn’t mean memory should be forgotten. Good developers will want to track the memory usage of their application and look to lower memory usage. Take a look at the common tools for doing this.
Tools for Python Memory Management
In addition to tools within base Python, there are a variety of packages available for memory management. Let’s explore a few of the most useful ones.
Base tools for Profiling Python Memory
The lowest layer of memory profiling involves looking at a single object in memory. You can do this by opening up a shell and doing something like the following:
>>> import sys
>>> sys.getsizeof({})
136
>>> sys.getsizeof([])
32
>>> sys.getsizeof(set())
112
Working with Python Memory Profiler
The easiest way to profile a single method or function is the open source memory-profiler package. It's similar to line_profiler, if you’re familiar with that package.
You can use it by putting the @profile decorator around any function or method and running python -m memory_profiler myscript. You'll see line-by-line memory usage once your script exits.
This is extremely useful if you're wanting to profile a section of memory-intensive code, but it won't help much if you have no idea where the biggest memory usage is. In that case, a higher-level approach of profiling is needed first.
Try Guppy to profile an entire application in Python
from guppy import hpy
h = hpy()
print h.heap()
This will print a nice table of usage grouped by object type. Here's an example of an PyQt4 application I've been working on:
Partition of a set of 235760 objects. Total size = 19909080 bytes. Index Count % Size % Cumulative % Kind (class / dict of class)
0 97264 41 8370996 42 8370996 42 str
1 47430 20 1916788 10 10287784 52 tuple
2 937 0 1106440 6 11394224 57 dict of PyQt4.QtCore.pyqtWrapperType
3 646 0 1033648 5 12427872 62 dict of module
4 11683 5 841176 4 13269048 67 types.CodeType
5 11684 5 654304 3 13923352 70 function
6 1200 1 583872 3 14507224 73 dict of type
7 782 0 566768 3 15073992 76 dict (no owner)
8 1201 1 536512 3 15610504 78 type
9 1019 0 499124 3 16109628 81 unicode
This type of profiling can be difficult if you have a large application using a relatively small number of object types.
Try Python profiler mprof for memory usage
mprof can show you memory usage over the lifetime of your application. This can be useful if you want to see if your memory is getting cleaned up and released periodically.
Even better, using mprof is easy; just run mprof run script script_args in your shell of choice. mprof will automatically create a graph of your script’s memory usage over time, which you can view by running mprof plot. It’s important to note here that plotting requires matplotlib. This is helpful when determining Python profile memory usage.
Profiling memory usage to address leaks
If you are dealing with memory leaks in Python, the easiest way to deal with them is to increase the memory allocation. While this is a quick fix, it comes at the cost of potentially creating an unstable product.
A better solution is to profile the memory usage of the application to better gain an understanding of the code and the packages that are being used. Once you are able to profile the memory and understand where leaks are happening, you can better deal with memory dumps.
To try to fix and avoid memory leaks, consider running memory-intensive tasks in separate processes. This will reduce the number of memory leaks and ensure that memory is released only after code has been executed.
Luke Lee
Luke Lee lives in Dresden, Germany and also writes at www.lukelee.me.
