How can I measure the actual memory usage of an application or process?

Solution 1:

With ps or similar tools you will only get the amount of memory pages allocated by that process. This number is correct, but:

• does not reflect the actual amount of memory used by the application, only the amount of memory reserved for it

• can be misleading if pages are shared, for example by several threads or by using dynamically linked libraries

If you really want to know what amount of memory your application actually uses, you need to run it within a profiler. For example, Valgrind can give you insights about the amount of memory used, and, more importantly, about possible memory leaks in your program. The heap profiler tool of Valgrind is called 'massif':

Massif is a heap profiler. It performs detailed heap profiling by taking regular snapshots of a program's heap. It produces a graph showing heap usage over time, including information about which parts of the program are responsible for the most memory allocations. The graph is supplemented by a text or HTML file that includes more information for determining where the most memory is being allocated. Massif runs programs about 20x slower than normal.

As explained in the Valgrind documentation, you need to run the program through Valgrind:

valgrind --tool=massif <executable> <arguments>

Massif writes a dump of memory usage snapshots (e.g. massif.out.12345). These provide, (1) a timeline of memory usage, (2) for each snapshot, a record of where in your program memory was allocated. A great graphical tool for analyzing these files is massif-visualizer. But I found ms_print, a simple text-based tool shipped with Valgrind, to be of great help already.

To find memory leaks, use the (default) memcheck tool of valgrind.

Solution 2:

Try the pmap command:

sudo pmap -x <process pid>

Solution 3:

It is hard to tell for sure, but here are two "close" things that can help.

$ ps aux

will give you Virtual Size (VSZ)

You can also get detailed statistics from the /proc file-system by going to /proc/$pid/status.

The most important is the VmSize, which should be close to what ps aux gives.

/proc/19420$ cat status
Name:      firefox
State:     S (sleeping)
Tgid:      19420
Pid:       19420
PPid:      1
TracerPid: 0
Uid:       1000    1000    1000    1000
Gid:       1000    1000    1000    1000
FDSize:    256
Groups:    4 6 20 24 25 29 30 44 46 107 109 115 124 1000
VmPeak:    222956 kB
VmSize:    212520 kB
VmLck:          0 kB
VmHWM:     127912 kB
VmRSS:     118768 kB
VmData:    170180 kB
VmStk:        228 kB
VmExe:         28 kB
VmLib:      35424 kB
VmPTE:        184 kB
Threads:   8
SigQ:      0/16382
SigPnd:    0000000000000000
ShdPnd:    0000000000000000
SigBlk:    0000000000000000
SigIgn:    0000000020001000
SigCgt:    000000018000442f
CapInh:    0000000000000000
CapPrm:    0000000000000000
CapEff:    0000000000000000
Cpus_allowed:    03
Mems_allowed:    1
voluntary_ctxt_switches:    63422
nonvoluntary_ctxt_switches: 7171

Solution 4:

In recent versions of Linux, use the smaps subsystem. For example, for a process with a PID of 1234:

cat /proc/1234/smaps

It will tell you exactly how much memory it is using at that time. More importantly, it will divide the memory into private and shared, so you can tell how much memory your instance of the program is using, without including memory shared between multiple instances of the program.