[Richard Suchenwirth] 2005-11-16 - Hunting for leaks in our software, I could not use the TCL_MEM_DEBUG mechanism. But the following code gives an approximate size in bytes consumed by the variables and children of a Tcl [namespace] (of which ::, the global namespace, is of particular interest - all its (grand)*children are also added). If you call this proc repeatedly, you can observe whether data are piling up: ====== proc namespace'size ns { set sum [expr wide(0)] foreach var [info vars ${ns}::*] { if {[info exists $var]} { upvar #0 $var v if {[array exists v]} { incr sum [string bytelength [array get v]] } else { incr sum [string bytelength $v] } } } foreach child [namespace children $ns] { incr sum [namespace'size $child] } set sum } ====== Usage example: % puts [namespace'size ::] 179914 ---- [JMN] 2005-11-16 Modified (added 'info exists $var' if block) to account for case where var 'exists' but has not been initialised - e.g., namespace eval ::something {variable x} [jcw] - By adding at least 1 more for each var/array seen, you'd also catch empty ones. Real memory use cannot easily be determined this way though, since the dual representation of values is not considered with this approach. - [RS] agrees; the question that led to this was: if we process, say, several thousand items, does the size stay constant, or increase significantly? <>Debugging | Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming