Measuring memory per Unix process

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written anything here. Since my last blog post, I've been taking two classes (in two very different topics), along with the other daily responsibilities of working, raising two children, etc.

For a work-related requirement, I had to figure out how to measure memory consumed by a specific Unix/Linux process. This is more difficult than it may seem.

For one thing, apparently the memory statistics given by Linux are meaningless. This is mainly because the ps command (and the VSZ metric specifically) only lists the size of the address space referenced by a process, not the actual memory size itself. This page suggests the use of smaps, where /proc/$pid/smaps provides the actual amount of memory used by a process.

Because the output of smaps is pretty lengthy, Someone wrote a python script called mem_usage.py to make the output more understandable.

The main issue is that smaps only exists in Linux, and I had a requirement to measure memory usage in OS X too. OS X doesn't even support the /proc concept so I couldn't use smaps.

In the end, I wound up going back to ps and relying on the RSS (resident set size) metric. It's displayed on multiple operating systems and indicates how much RAM is being used for the text and data segments for a specific process in kilobytes.

11:52:44[~/ruby:162]$ ps u
USER    PID  %CPU %MEM      VSZ    RSS   TT  STAT STARTED      TIME COMMAND
rpark  2668   0.6  1.4  1652720  44816 s000  S    12:40AM   5:01.71 ./eclipse
rpark  4598   0.0  0.1  2435088   1800 s001  S+   11:01PM   0:00.09 ssh rpark@1
rpark  2878   0.0  1.2  2769524  36688 s000  S     1:17AM   0:25.44 /System/Lib
rpark   799   0.0  0.0  2435468    792 s001  S    Tue12PM   0:00.18 -bash
rpark   535   0.0  0.0  2435468    756 s000  S    Tue11AM   0:00.30 -bash

Here are some more discussions on this topic.