I am having a lot of confusion using the sys.getsizeof function in python. All I want to find out is that for say a floating point value, is the system using 4 or 8 bytes (i.e. single or double precision in C terms). I do the following: import sys x = 0.0 sys.getsizeof(x) # Returns 24 type(x) # returns float sys.getsizeof(float) # Returns 400. How can I simply find out the how many bytes are actually used for the floating point representation. I know it should be 8 bytes but how can I verify this (something like the sizeof operator in C++) Continue reading...