--- a/scripts/stacked_dae/utils.py	Sun Feb 21 17:30:38 2010 -0600
+++ b/scripts/stacked_dae/utils.py	Mon Feb 22 13:38:25 2010 -0500
@@ -2,6 +2,12 @@
 
 from jobman import DD
 
+# from pylearn codebase
+def update_locals(obj, dct):
+    if 'self' in dct:
+        del dct['self']
+    obj.__dict__.update(dct)
+
 def produit_croise_jobs(val_dict):
     job_list = [DD()]
     all_keys = val_dict.keys()
@@ -23,3 +29,29 @@
     print produit_croise_jobs(vals)
 
 
+# taken from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/276052/how-to-get-current-cpu-and-ram-usage-in-python
+"""Simple module for getting amount of memory used by a specified user's
+processes on a UNIX system.
+It uses UNIX ps utility to get the memory usage for a specified username and
+pipe it to awk for summing up per application memory usage and return the total.
+Python's Popen() from subprocess module is used for spawning ps and awk.
+
+"""
+
+import subprocess
+
+class MemoryMonitor(object):
+
+    def __init__(self, username):
+        """Create new MemoryMonitor instance."""
+        self.username = username
+
+    def usage(self):
+        """Return int containing memory used by user's processes."""
+        self.process = subprocess.Popen("ps -u %s -o rss | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}'" % self.username,
+                                        shell=True,
+                                        stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
+                                        )
+        self.stdout_list = self.process.communicate()[0].split('\n')
+        return int(self.stdout_list[0])
+