PERF: unnecessary materialization of a MultiIndex.values when introspecting memory_usage

doc/source/whatsnew/v0.19.0.txt

@@ -1409,7 +1409,7 @@ Performance Improvements
 - Improved performance of ``factorize`` of datetime with timezone (:issue:`13750`)
 - Improved performance of by lazily creating indexing hashtables on larger Indexes (:issue:`14266`)
 - Improved performance of ``groupby.groups`` (:issue:`14293`)
-
+- Unecessary materializing of a MultiIndex when introspecting for memory usage (:issue:`14308`)
 
 .. _whatsnew_0190.bug_fixes:
 

pandas/indexes/multi.py

@@ -413,10 +413,27 @@ def _shallow_copy(self, values=None, **kwargs):
     def dtype(self):
         return np.dtype('O')
 
+    @Appender(Index.memory_usage.__doc__)
+    def memory_usage(self, deep=False):
+        # we are overwriting our base class to avoid
+        # computing .values here which could materialize
+        # a tuple representation uncessarily
+        return self._nbytes(deep)
+
     @cache_readonly
     def nbytes(self):
         """ return the number of bytes in the underlying data """
-        level_nbytes = sum((i.nbytes for i in self.levels))
+        return self._nbytes(False)
+
+    def _nbytes(self, deep=False):
+        """
+        return the number of bytes in the underlying data
+        deeply introspect the level data if deep=True
+
+        *this is in internal routine*
+
+        """
+        level_nbytes = sum((i.memory_usage(deep=deep) for i in self.levels))
         label_nbytes = sum((i.nbytes for i in self.labels))
         names_nbytes = sum((getsizeof(i) for i in self.names))
         return level_nbytes + label_nbytes + names_nbytes

pandas/tests/frame/test_repr_info.py

@@ -381,3 +381,27 @@ def test_info_memory_usage(self):
         # deep=True, and add on some GC overhead
         diff = df.memory_usage(deep=True).sum() - sys.getsizeof(df)
         self.assertTrue(abs(diff) < 100)
+
+    def test_info_memory_usage_bug_on_multiindex(self):
+        # GH 14308
+        # memory usage introspection should not materialize .values
+
+        from string import ascii_uppercase as uppercase
+
+        def memory_usage(f):
+            return f.memory_usage(deep=True).sum()
+
+        N = 100
+        M = len(uppercase)
+        index = pd.MultiIndex.from_product([list(uppercase),
+                                            pd.date_range('20160101',
+                                                          periods=N)],
+                                           names=['id', 'date'])
+        df = DataFrame({'value': np.random.randn(N * M)}, index=index)
+
+        unstacked = df.unstack('id')
+        self.assertEqual(df.values.nbytes, unstacked.values.nbytes)
+        self.assertTrue(memory_usage(df) > memory_usage(unstacked))
+
+        # high upper bound
+        self.assertTrue(memory_usage(unstacked) - memory_usage(df) < 2000)