Is there a (simple) way to get the memory usage of a Lua table?

memory-management lua lua-table
user295625 picture user295625 · Mar 17, 2010 · Viewed 9.7k times · Source

I'd like to find out how much memory a Lua table is using - without iterating through the table contents and counting up the usage. Is there a Lua 5.1 function or 3rd party library that could help with this.

Answer

deorst picture deorst · Mar 18, 2010

You can monitor the memory usage of Lua by calling collectgarbage("count") or gcinfo() in the appropriate locations throughout the code (e.g. before and after insert operations). There's no trivial way to get the size of a table.

Related questions

What are the -Xms and -Xmx parameters when starting JVM?

Please explain the use of Xms and Xmx parameters in JVMs. What are the default values for them?

Read More
What and where are the stack and heap?

Programming language books explain that value types are created on the stack, and reference types are created on the heap, without explaining what these two things are. I haven't read a clear explanation of this. I understand what a stack …

Read More
How do I determine the size of an object in Python?

I want to know how to get size of objects like a string, integer, etc. in Python. Related question: How many bytes per element are there in a Python list (tuple)? I am using an XML file which contains size …

Read More