I want to record how much memory (in bytes, hopefully) an object takes up for a project (I'm comparing sizes of data structures) and it seems like there is no method to do this in Java. Supposedly, C/C++ has sizeOf()
method, but this is nonexistant in Java. I tried recording the free memory in the JVM with Runtime.getRuntime().freeMemory()
before and after creating the object and then recording the difference, but it would only give 0 or 131304, and nothing in between, regardless of the number of elements in the structure. Help please!
3 Answers
You can use the java.lang.instrumentation
package.
It has a method that can be used to get the implementation specific approximation of object size, as well as overhead associated with the object.
The answer that Sergey linked has a great example, which I'll repost here, but you should have already looked at from his comment:
import java.lang.instrument.Instrumentation;
public class ObjectSizeFetcher {
private static Instrumentation instrumentation;
public static void premain(String args, Instrumentation inst) {
instrumentation = inst;
}
public static long getObjectSize(Object o) {
return instrumentation.getObjectSize(o);
}
}
Use getObjectSize
:
public class C {
private int x;
private int y;
public static void main(String [] args) {
System.out.println(ObjectSizeFetcher.getObjectSize(new C()));
}
}
Look into https://github.com/DimitrisAndreou/memory-measurer.
Guava uses it internally, and ObjectGraphMeasurer
is especially straightforward to use out-of-the-box, without any special command-line arguments.
import objectexplorer.ObjectGraphMeasurer;
public class Measurer {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Set<Integer> hashset = new HashSet<Integer>();
Random random = new Random();
int n = 10000;
for (int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
hashset.add(random.nextInt());
}
System.out.println(ObjectGraphMeasurer.measure(hashset));
}
}
The java.lang.instrument.Instrumentation
class provides a nice way to get the size of a Java Object, but it requires you to define a premain
and run your program with a java agent. This is very boring when you do not need any agent and then you have to provide a dummy Jar agent to your application.
So I got an alternative solution using the Unsafe
class from the sun.misc
. So, considering the objects heap alignment according to the processor architecture and calculating the maximum field offset, you can measure the size of a Java Object. In the example below I use an auxiliary class UtilUnsafe
to get a reference to the sun.misc.Unsafe
object.
private static final int NR_BITS = Integer.valueOf(System.getProperty("sun.arch.data.model"));
private static final int BYTE = 8;
private static final int WORD = NR_BITS/BYTE;
private static final int MIN_SIZE = 16;
public static int sizeOf(Class src){
//
// Get the instance fields of src class
//
List<Field> instanceFields = new LinkedList<Field>();
do{
if(src == Object.class) return MIN_SIZE;
for (Field f : src.getDeclaredFields()) {
if((f.getModifiers() & Modifier.STATIC) == 0){
instanceFields.add(f);
}
}
src = src.getSuperclass();
}while(instanceFields.isEmpty());
//
// Get the field with the maximum offset
//
long maxOffset = 0;
for (Field f : instanceFields) {
long offset = UtilUnsafe.UNSAFE.objectFieldOffset(f);
if(offset > maxOffset) maxOffset = offset;
}
return (((int)maxOffset/WORD) + 1)*WORD;
}
class UtilUnsafe {
public static final sun.misc.Unsafe UNSAFE;
static {
Object theUnsafe = null;
Exception exception = null;
try {
Class<?> uc = Class.forName("sun.misc.Unsafe");
Field f = uc.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
f.setAccessible(true);
theUnsafe = f.get(uc);
} catch (Exception e) { exception = e; }
UNSAFE = (sun.misc.Unsafe) theUnsafe;
if (UNSAFE == null) throw new Error("Could not obtain access to sun.misc.Unsafe", exception);
}
private UtilUnsafe() { }
}