How can I get the total physical memory within Python in a distribution agnostic fashion? I don't need used memory, just the total physical memory.
4 Answers
your best bet for a cross-platform solution is to use the psutil package (available on PyPI).
import psutil
psutil.virtual_memory().total # total physical memory in Bytes
Documentation for virtual_memory is here.
4 Comments
Thomas Weller
mem = virtual_memory() and then # total physical memory? Sounds greatLorem Ipsum
Future proofed with 2018/12/18: web.archive.org/web/20181228093919/https://…
user1098761
int(np.round(psutil.virtual_memory().total / (1024. **3))) with a tip from @Asclepius.
Joerg S
total does not (always?) seem to return the total physical memory available. E.g. getting 33429086208 for a 32 GB machine. Expected (as reported by free): 34359738368
Using os.sysconf on Linux:
import os
mem_bytes = os.sysconf('SC_PAGE_SIZE') * os.sysconf('SC_PHYS_PAGES') # e.g. 4015976448
mem_gib = mem_bytes/(1024.**3) # e.g. 3.74
Note:
SC_PAGE_SIZEis often 4096.SC_PAGESIZEandSC_PAGE_SIZEare equal.- For more info, see
man sysconf. - For MacOS, as per user reports, this works with Python 3.7 but not with Python 3.8.
Using /proc/meminfo on Linux:
meminfo = dict((i.split()[0].rstrip(':'),int(i.split()[1])) for i in open('/proc/meminfo').readlines())
mem_kib = meminfo['MemTotal'] # e.g. 3921852
7 Comments
maxschlepzig
FWIW, the
os.sysconf() approach also works with Python 3 and even under Solaris 10.John Difool
I am happy to report that it's working on MacOS X 10.13 (High Sierra) with Python 3.6.4.
Nick Korostelev
On MacOs, works fine on Python 3.7 but not on Python 3.8.3. Getting
ValueError: unrecognized configuration name for os.sysconf('SC_PHYS_PAGES')Nick Korostelev
Ideally I would want to figure out how to do this without external dependencies such as
psutil |
Regular expressions work well for this sort of thing, and might help with any minor differences across distributions.
import re
with open('/proc/meminfo') as f:
meminfo = f.read()
matched = re.search(r'^MemTotal:\s+(\d+)', meminfo)
if matched:
mem_total_kB = int(matched.groups()[0])
5 Comments
Corey Goldberg
/proc only exists on Linux... so not cross-platform
Corey Goldberg
I mistook distribution-agnostic for cross-platform... and now I see it's tagged Linux. my bad :)
Martin Thoma
/proc/meminfo seems not to work as expected on AWS: Why does /proc/meminfo show 32GB when AWS instance has only 16GB?ThisGuyCantEven
@JoshuaDetwiler You don't need to explicitly close files when using contexts like this. When the context (the with block) is closed the file will be with it.
ThisGuyCantEven
Also @martin-thoma What AWS image are you using, I do not have this issue with the latest amazonlinux2.
This code worked for me without any external library at Python 2.7.9
import os
mem=str(os.popen('free -t -m').readlines())
"""
Get a whole line of memory output, it will be something like below
[' total used free shared buffers cached\n',
'Mem: 925 591 334 14 30 355\n',
'-/+ buffers/cache: 205 719\n',
'Swap: 99 0 99\n',
'Total: 1025 591 434\n']
So, we need total memory, usage and free memory.
We should find the index of capital T which is unique at this string
"""
T_ind=mem.index('T')
"""
Than, we can recreate the string with this information. After T we have,
"Total: " which has 14 characters, so we can start from index of T +14
and last 4 characters are also not necessary.
We can create a new sub-string using this information
"""
mem_G=mem[T_ind+14:-4]
"""
The result will be like
1025 603 422
we need to find first index of the first space, and we can start our substring
from from 0 to this index number, this will give us the string of total memory
"""
S1_ind=mem_G.index(' ')
mem_T=mem_G[0:S1_ind]
print 'Summary = ' + mem_G
print 'Total Memory = ' + mem_T +' MB'
Easily we can get the Used Memory and Free Memory
"""
Similarly we will create a new sub-string, which will start at the second value.
The resulting string will be like
603 422
Again, we should find the index of first space and than the
take the Used Memory and Free memory.
"""
mem_G1=mem_G[S1_ind+8:]
S2_ind=mem_G1.index(' ')
mem_U=mem_G1[0:S2_ind]
mem_F=mem_G1[S2_ind+8:]
print 'Used Memory = ' + mem_U +' MB'
print 'Free Memory = ' + mem_F +' MB'
1 Comment
Martin Thoma
free is not installed by default on Mac
/proc/meminfo./proc/meminfoshould be available on pretty much all linux installs./proc/meminfobecausesysconfhas the answer.