From: Robert Hulme <robert.hulme@...>
Date: 2008-06-17T18:54:35+09:00
Subject: Can I find out the memory used by an object?

I'm 99% sure the answer to that question is no, but I thought I'd ask anyway :-)

Practically speaking it's only of use to me if it can be done on MRI (Ruby 1.8).

Trivially I can do something like (apologies for the hackiness, and
not using the sysutil gem):

def memory_used
  File.read("/proc/#$$/status").match(/^VmSize:\s*(\d*)/)[1].to_i
end

mem_used = memory_used()
mem_used_since = memory_used - mem_used # Returns difference in KB
since mem_used was set

But that only tells me something about the Ruby process, not a
particular object.

The reason I ask is because I would like to create a cache object that
stores complex objects, but is smart enough to remove the oldest
things in the cache when the cache is using more than a certain amount
of memory.

I could Marshall.dump the objects and work out something crudely that
way, but the reason I want the cache in the first place is because
Marshall.dump and Marshall.load is too time expensive :-)

Thanks
-Rob

-- 
George Carlin  - "Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die,
your soul goes up on the roof and gets stu...