Getting total/free RAM from within Python

Question

From within a Python application, how can I get the total amount of RAM of the system and how much of it is currently free, in a cross-platform way?

Ideally, the amount of free RAM should consider only physical memory that can actually be allocated to the Python process.

Answer 1

Have you tried SIGAR - System Information Gatherer And Reporter? After install

import os, sigar

sg = sigar.open()
mem = sg.mem()
sg.close() 
print mem.total() / 1024, mem.free() / 1024

Hope this helps

Answer 2

psutil would be another good choice. It also needs a library installed however.

>>> import psutil
>>> psutil.virtual_memory()
vmem(total=8374149120L, available=2081050624L, percent=75.1,
     used=8074080256L, free=300068864L, active=3294920704,
     inactive=1361616896, buffers=529895424L, cached=1251086336)

Answer 3

For the free memory part, there is a function in the wx library:

wx.GetFreeMemory()

Unfortunately, this only works on Windows. Linux and Mac ports either return "-1" or raise a NotImplementedError.

Answer 4

You can't do this with just the standard Python library, although there might be some third party package that does it. Barring that, you can use the os package to determine which operating system you're on and use that information to acquire the info you want for that system (and encapsulate that into a single cross-platform function).

Answer 5

In windows I use this method. It's kinda hacky but it works using standard os library:

import os
process = os.popen('wmic memorychip get capacity')
result = process.read()
process.close()
totalMem = 0
for m in result.split("  \r\n")[1:-1]:
    totalMem += int(m)
print totalMem / (1024**3)