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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-14T06:12:28+00:00

I’m having troubles mainly from my inexperience with python and OSX, and trying to

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I’m having troubles mainly from my inexperience with python and OSX, and trying to understand how it all works.

End goal is to get this module to run: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/memory_profiler, except it never finds the module.

So for starters I did the easy_install and everything installed fine from what I can tell:

easy_install -U memory_profiler # pip install -U memory_profiler

Next I created an example.py file just to get the ball rolling:

@profile
def my_func():
    return 2

if __name__ == '__main__':
    my_func()

and tried to run it, but got this error:

$ python example.py

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "example.py", line 2, in <module>
    @profile
NameError: name 'profile' is not defined

This isn’t so much a question about the memory_profiler module, but more about what am I doing wrong and have configured incorrectly? I’m using OSX 10.8.2 with Python 2.7.

This is what my “which python” states:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin/python

Since its a symbolic link, when I go to the original its at:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python

Where I’m confused is that easy_install correctly put the memory_profiler.py file in this folder:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages

And I have the understanding that when python runs, it checks for modules in the PYTHONPATH and in the site-packages. (??)

But if the module is in the site-packages folder, why doesn’t the example.py work? Also, if modules in the site-packages folder should be a part of the path, I figured I could at least run the memory_profiler.py just to see if it gets ran by python, but got this error instead:

python memory_profiler.py
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python: 
can't open file 'memory_profiler.py': [Errno 2] No such file or directory

This also confuses me, because its stating that python is in: ../2.7/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python, but I thought it was supposed to be ../2.7/bin/python, and shouldn’t it be checking for the memory_profiler.py file in ../2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages?

Also, why do both of these folders exist, and what’s the difference?

/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework

I’m missing a big piece of the puzzle, so any help to point in the right direction would be very appreciated.

Update:

I was leaving out:

from memory_profiler import profiler

Probably most of my bonehead issue, but now I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "example.py", line 1, in <module>
from memory_profiler import profiler
ImportError: cannot import name profiler
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I assume you have your import statments? from memory_profiler import profiler… From reading your question it appears that you think that python automatically imports everything from all modules in the PYTHONPATH, which it doesn’t because that would take up too much memory and what if two modules have the same function.

    Edit

    So it appears the only way that the @profiler decorator works is if you run the program from the commandline…

    python -m memory_profiler example.py

    If you want to use memory_profiler from within the script refer to this example. https://github.com/fabianp/memory_profiler/blob/master/examples/plot_memory.py

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