psutil 返回不准确的 RAM 使用信息

Question

I am building a hardware utilisation display into my Python project using the psutil package.

In the Python shell, I am getting the RAM usage as shown below:

>>> import psutil
>>> psutil.virtual_memory()
svmem(total=17179869184, available=6488571904, percent=62.2, used=9150734336, free=20709376, active=6468239360, inactive=6167109632, wired=2682494976)

There is a large discrepancy between the total value and the actual maximum RAM capacity of my computer, the same applies to the available and used values.

Below is a cropped screenshot of the RAM usage info in the macOS Activity Monitor app, taken not so long after the psutil.virtual_memory() command in the Python shell.

What could be causing these discrepancies, and how do I fix this?

Answer 1

There's no discrepancy. Values are in bits.

You can get a human-readable version of those sizes with the humanize library. For example, I copied some of the numbers from psutil that you posted in your question in this script:

import humanize

print("total: " + humanize.naturalsize(17179869184, binary=True))
print("available: " + humanize.naturalsize(6488571904, binary=True))
print("used: " + humanize.naturalsize(9150734336, binary=True))
print("active: " + humanize.naturalsize(6468239360, binary=True))
print("inactive: " + humanize.naturalsize(6167109632, binary=True))

Which prints:

total: 16.0 GiB
available: 6.0 GiB
used: 8.5 GiB
active: 6.0 GiB
inactive: 5.7 GiB

I believe that this output matches the data shown by your UI.

Note that most hardware vendors and hardware-related tools use the incorrect units to represent size . Ie you should see GiB instead of GB.