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Thanks to the PEP 445, it becomes possible to trace easily memory allocations. I propose to add a new tracemalloc module computing the memory usage per file and per line number.
I implemented the module as a third party module for Python 2.5-3.4, but it requires to patch and recompile Python:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytracemalloc
My proposed implementation is different:
* use a simple C implementation of an hash table called "cfuhash" (coming from the libcfu project) instead of depending on the glib library ; I simplified and adapted the implementation for my usage
* no enable() / disable() function: tracemalloc can only be enabled before startup by setting PYTHONTRACEMALLOC=1 environment variable
* traces (size of the memory block, Python filename, Python line number) are stored directly in the memory block, not in a separated hash table
I chose PYTHONTRACEMALLOC env var instead of enable()/disable() functions to be able to really trace *all* memory allocated by Python, especially memory allocated at startup, during Python initialization.
TODO:
* The (high-level) API should be reviewed and discussed
* The documention should be improved
* PyMem_Raw API is not hooked yet because the code is not thread-safe (it relies on the Python GIL)
* Filenames should not be encoded: the hash table should directly use Unicode strings (PyObject*), encoding a filename allocates memory and may call the garbage collector
* Memory is not released at exit
For the documentation, see the following page:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pytracemalloc
See also the https://bitbucket.org/haypo/pyfailmalloc project and the issue #18408.