Provide module-level functions to calculate total system used physical/virtual memory

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 25, 2009 15:49:12

psutil module should have module-level functions to tell total used
physical/virtual memory in bytes and as a percentage of total available.

Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/psutil/issues/detail?id=44

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 25, 2009 07:51:14

Blocked on Issue #43

Blockedon: 43

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 25, 2009 08:13:54

Labels: -Milestone-0.2.0 Milestone-0.1.2

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 25, 2009 19:44:01

Implemented on Linux as r322 .
We're now using the following naming convention:

TOTAL_MEM
used_mem()
total_virtmem()
used_virtmem()

Status: Started

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 25, 2009 19:44:52

Labels: -Progress-0in4 Progress-1in4

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 26, 2009 09:17:42

Implemented on Windows as r324 .

Labels: -Progress-1in4 Progress-2in4

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 29, 2009 10:23:55

I suggest we implement this as the following functions, since it's trivial to
determine both used and avail based on one or the other and the total value. 

total_phymem() (with a constant TOTAL_PHYMEM)
total_virtmem()
used_mem()
avail_mem()
used_virtmem()
avail_virtmem()

Implemented avail_mem/used_mem in FreeBSD as r327 and updated Linux code to use
TOTAL_PHYMEM constant as with other modules, instead of TOTAL_MEM. Still need to
implement avail_virtmem() and used_virtmem() on FreeBSD.

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 29, 2009 10:55:55

Implemented used_mem() and avail_mem() for OS X in r329

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 29, 2009 11:13:53

Determining the used memory is quite easy for the user. It consists in just doing:

> used_mem = tot_mem() - avail_mem()

For this reason I don't think that providing a function for doing that is 
worthwhile, imo.

It's like the current get_process_list() function which consists in nothing but a
"return list(process_iter())" instruction.

I usually tend to be minimalistic in such kind of situations.

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 30, 2009 07:05:42

We're providing a convenience library, so it makes sense to me to provide things
which are likely to be common. I prefer having both available since they're both
likely to be frequently used and it's arbitrary to decide "we provide available
memory, it's up to you to calculate free memory" or vice versa. There's no logical
reason to single out either specific one, so I would prefer not forcing us to make a
choice unnecessarily. Minimalism is generally desirable but we're talking about two
lines of Python code here, I think we can spare it.

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 30, 2009 08:06:09

I'd recommend to rename used_mem() and avail_mem() to used_phymem() and
avail_phymem() for consistency with other function names.

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 30, 2009 11:42:38

I went with avail_mem() and used_mem() just because they're shorter to type, I
figured that was less annoying than avail_phymem() and used_phymem() since the
*virtmem() functions are already separate. Either one is fine but if you rename it
give me a heads up and make sure you rename it in *all* of the files where it's
referenced as well as in _psutil.py __all__ list

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on March 30, 2009 17:10:05

Renamed as r332 .

[giampaolo]

From [email protected] on April 07, 2009 08:51:04

This should be now fixed/implemented on all platforms

Status: Fixed
Labels: -Progress-2in4

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on June 09, 2011 15:33:50

Labels: -OpSys-All

[giampaolo]

From g.rodola on March 02, 2013 03:48:11

Updated csets after the SVN -> Mercurial migration: r322 == revision 
1ce59580ce9c r324 == revision e1deef5a07e2 r327 == revision 48c26cd94679 r329 == revision 951dcf2261ee r332 == revision 4db855a26077