[java] In Java, what is the best way to determine the size of an object?

Some years back Javaworld had an article on determining the size of composite and potentially nested Java objects, they basically walk through creating a sizeof() implementation in Java. The approach basically builds on other work where people experimentally identified the size of primitives and typical Java objects and then apply that knowledge to a method that recursively walks an object graph to tally the total size.

It is always going to be somewhat less accurate than a native C implementation simply because of the things going on behind the scenes of a class but it should be a good indicator.

Alternatively a SourceForge project appropriately called sizeof that offers a Java5 library with a sizeof() implementation.

P.S. Do not use the serialization approach, there is no correlation between the size of a serialized object and the amount of memory it consumes when live.