Get Total Physical Memory in Python

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

Using `os.sysconf`¶

Notice that this ways only works on Linux but not on macOS or Windows.

Get physical memory in bytes.

import os

os.sysconf("SC_PAGE_SIZE") * os.sysconf("SC_PHYS_PAGES")

67327844352

Parse the File /proc/meminfo¶

!head /proc/meminfo

MemTotal:       65749848 kB
MemFree:          632084 kB
MemAvailable:   52502788 kB
Buffers:         1528080 kB
Cached:         47313580 kB
SwapCached:           60 kB
Active:         18386936 kB
Inactive:       40492096 kB
Active(anon):       5928 kB
Inactive(anon): 10750316 kB

Get physical memory in KB.

with Path("/proc/meminfo").open() as fin:
    line = fin.readline()
    if line.startswith("MemTotal:"):
        print(int(line[9:-3]))

65749848

65749848 * 1024

67327844352

Using psutil¶

import psutil

psutil.virtual_memory()

svmem(total=67327844352, available=53696008192, percent=20.2, used=12146085888, free=561696768, active=18897117184, inactive=41479438336, buffers=1565102080, cached=53054959616, shared=806260736, slab=5218934784)

psutil.virtual_memory().total

67327844352

Of course, psutil is much more powerful. It is capable of getting process-level resource consumption. For more discussion, please refer to Hands on the psutil Module in Python .

Get Total Physical Memory in Python

Using os.sysconf¶

Parse the File /proc/meminfo¶

Using psutil¶

Using `os.sysconf`¶