CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmemoryout-of-memory
stenci
stenci

Reputation: 8481

Stop a program before it uses too much memory

I'm working on a Python program which sometimes fills up a list with millions of items. The computer (Ubuntu) starts swapping and the debugger (Eclipse) becomes unresponsive.

Is it possible to add a line in the cycle that checks how much memory is being used, and interrupts the execution, so I can check what's going on?

I'm thinking about something like:

if usedmemory() > 1000000000:
    pass # with a breakpoint here

but I don't know what used memory() could be.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2895

Answers (1)

TankorSmash
TankorSmash

Reputation: 12767

This is highly dependant on the machine you're running Python on. Here's a SO answer for a way to do it on Linux https://stackoverflow.com/a/278271/541208, but the other answer there offers a more platform independant solution: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2468983/541208: The psutil library, which you can install via pip install psutil:

>>> psutil.virtual_memory()
vmem(total=8374149120L, available=2081050624L, percent=75.1, used=8074080256L, free=300068864L, active=3294920704, inactive=1361616896, buffers=529895424L, cached=1251086336)
>>> psutil.swap_memory()
swap(total=2097147904L, used=296128512L, free=1801019392L, percent=14.1, sin=304193536, sout=677842944)

So you'd look at the percent of the available memory and kill your process depending on how much memory it has been using

Upvotes: 3

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