Memory Profiling

CPU profiling identifies which function is slow. Memory profiling identifies which code is allocating, holding, or leaking objects. The two questions are different and the tools are different. A program with a steady 4 GB memory footprint where 400 MB was expected is wasting memory somewhere, and the only way to find the leak is to measure. This lesson covers tracemalloc (built-in snapshots and diffs), memory_profiler (line-by-line and time-series), objgraph (tracking down what is holding references), and the workflows that turn vague "memory is growing" reports into concrete fixes.