How to measure total memory usage of all processes of a user in Python

Question

I like to use these commands to see my memory usage on my servers:

ps -u $USERNAME -o pid,rss,command | awk '{print $0}{sum+=$2} END {print "Total", sum}'

What would be the best way to collect that total sum in a Python script? I had a look as psutil but that module only collects global memory information and there is no way to filter it down by user.

Answer 1

It's pretty simple using psutil. You can just iterate over all processes, select the ones that are owned by you and sum the memory returned by memory_info().

import psutil
import getpass

user = getpass.getuser()

total = sum(p.memory_info()[0] for p in psutil.process_iter()
                               if p.username() == user)

print('Total memory usage in bytes: ', total)