Coincidentally I went through a very similar process debugging memory usage of an internal application with guppy recently. One thing I learned is that file dum

Coincidentally I went through a very similar process debugging memory usage of an internal application with guppy recently. One thing I learned is that file dumps and the profile browser are kindof a trap. You discard a huge amount of information when you dump the heap summary to file. The guppy docs aren't too great, but you can poke around the entire heap in detail if you break into a debugger after taking a heap snapshot. You can explore references and referrers, group objects by various categories, and inspect their values without the tedious ctypes cast trick.