How to measure total STL container memory consumption?

Question

As in the title: given an object of type of some STL container (eg std::vector<int> or std::set<MyClass> ) I would like to know their memory consumption --- that is --- how much memory is consumed to store the elements, the auxiliary data for each element and the container size. I assume that the objects stored do not allocate any additional memory.

For a std::vector<int> v I can add:

sizeof(std::vector<int>) + v.capacity()*sizeof(int)

because vectors do not store any auxiliary data per element. But how can I do it for other containers?

I can live with non-constant time complexity.

Answer 1

Create your own STL allocator and track the size of the memory requests placed to it, then jsut add the size of the container itself. This article gives a good overview of creating one.