Thoughts on Product Management

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 measu