Question

I am writing Python code to do some big number calculation, and have serious concern about the memory used in the calculation.

Thus, I want to count every bit of each variable.

For example, I have a variable x, which is a big number, and want to count the number of bits for representing x.

The following code is obviously useless:

x=2**1000
len(x)

Thus, I turn to use the following code:

x=2**1000
len(repr(x))

The variable x is (in decimal) is:

10715086071862673209484250490600018105614048117055336074437503883703510511249361224931983788156958581275946729175531468251871452856923140435984577574698574803934567774824230985421074605062371141877954182153046474983581941267398767559165543946077062914571196477686542167660429831652624386837205668069376

but the above code returns 303

The above long long sequence is of length 302, and so I believe that 303 should be related to the string length only.

So, here comes my original question:

How can I know the memory size of variable x?

One more thing; in C/C++ language, if I define

int z=1;

This means that there are 4 bytes= 32 bits allocated for z, and the bits are arranged as 00..001(31 0’s and one 1).

Here, my variable x is huge, I don’t know whether it follows the same memory allocation rule?

Answer 1

Use sys.getsizeof to get the size of an object, in bytes.

>>> from sys import getsizeof
>>> a = 42
>>> getsizeof(a)
12
>>> a = 2**1000
>>> getsizeof(a)
146
>>>

Note that the size and layout of an object is purely implementation-specific. CPython, for example, may use totally different internal data structures than IronPython. So the size of an object may vary from implementation to implementation.