From the documentation (my bold) (a):
Only the memory consumption directly attributed to the object is accounted for, not the memory consumption of objects it refers to.
So the size of v does not include the sizes of the elements it refers to.
If you change kite into kites, you'll also see that its size increases but not the size of v (I've replaced your big number with 100...00 in the output to ease formatting):
1 size is: 12 2 size is: 12 kite size is: 25 100...00 size is: 102 Total size is: 48 1 size is: 12 2 size is: 12 kites size is: 26 100...00 size is: 102 Total size is: 48
Think of it like this:
/ +-----+ | v | ref | -> 1 Size | | ref | -> 2 of v | | ref | -> 'kite' | | ref | -> 100**100 \ +-----+ \___________________________/ Size of things referred to by v
(a) That page also has a link to a recipe for doing recursive size calculations if you need that information. The link is duplicated here for citation, and the code is duplicated below to make this answer more self-contained.
Plugging your structure into that code gives:
48 <type 'list'> [1, 2, 'kites', 100...00L] 12 <type 'int'> 1 12 <type 'int'> 2 26 <type 'str'> 'kites' 102 <type 'long'> 100...00L 200
The code, with your structure, is shown below.
from __future__ import print_function from sys import getsizeof, stderr from itertools import chain from collections import deque try: from reprlib import repr except ImportError: pass def total_size(o, handlers={}, verbose=False): """ Returns the approximate memory footprint an object and all of its contents. Automatically finds the contents of the following builtin containers and their subclasses: tuple, list, deque, dict, set and frozenset. To search other containers, add handlers to iterate over their contents: handlers = {SomeContainerClass: iter, OtherContainerClass: OtherContainerClass.get_elements} """ dict_handler = lambda d: chain.from_iterable(d.items()) all_handlers = {tuple: iter, list: iter, deque: iter, dict: dict_handler, set: iter, frozenset: iter, } all_handlers.update(handlers) # user handlers take precedence seen = set() # track which object id's have already been seen default_size = getsizeof(0) # estimate sizeof object without __sizeof__ def sizeof(o): if id(o) in seen: # do not double count the same object return 0 seen.add(id(o)) s = getsizeof(o, default_size) if verbose: print(s, type(o), repr(o), file=stderr) for typ, handler in all_handlers.items(): if isinstance(o, typ): s += sum(map(sizeof, handler(o))) break return s return sizeof(o) ##### Example call ##### if __name__ == '__main__': v = [1,2,'kites',100**100] print(total_size(v, verbose=True))
