As part of the development of memory_profiler I've tried several ways to get memory usage of a program from within Python. In this post I'll describe the different alternatives I've tested.

The psutil library

psutil is a python library that provides an interface for retrieving information on running processes. It …

Besides performing a line-by-line analysis of memory consumption, memory_profiler exposes some functions that allow to retrieve the memory consumption of a function in real-time, allowing e.g. to visualize the memory consumption of a given function over time.

The function to be used is memory_usage. The first argument specifies what …