Memory usage

So far we have simply looked at the execution times and ignored the memory usage of the scripts. In many cases, the execution times are the most important, but memory usage should not be ignored. In almost all cases, CPU and memory are traded; a code either uses a lot of CPU or a lot of memory, which means that both do matter a lot.

Tracemalloc

Monitoring memory usage used to be something that was only possible through external Python modules such as Dowser or Heapy. While those modules still work, they are largely obsolete now because of the tracemalloc module. Let's give the tracemalloc module a try to see how easy memory usage monitoring is nowadays:

import tracemalloc


if __name__ == '__main__':
    tracemalloc.start()

    # Reserve some memory
    x = list(range(1000000))

    # Import some modules
    import os
    import sys
    import asyncio

    # Take a snapshot to calculate the memory usage
    snapshot = tracemalloc.take_snapshot()
    for statistic in snapshot.statistics...