Peak memory usage of a linux unix process

Question

Is there a tool that will run a command-line and report the peak RAM usage total   I m imagining something analogous to  usr bin time

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On MacOS Sierra use    usr bin time -l commandToMeasure   You can use grep to take what you want maybe

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Valgrind one-liner  valgrind --tool massif --pages-as-heap yes --massif-out-file massif out   test sh  grep mem heap B massif out   sed -e  s mem heap B         1     sort -g   tail -n 1 Note use of --pages-as-heap to measure all memory in a process  More info here  http   valgrind org docs manual ms-manual html This will slow down your command significantly

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You can use a tool like Valgrind to do this

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Perhaps  gnu  time 1  already does what you want   For instance      usr bin time -f   P  M  command 43  821248   But other profiling tools may give more accurate results depending on what you are looking for

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htop  is best command for see which process is using how much RAM        for more detail  http   manpages ubuntu com manpages precise man1 htop 1 html

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time -f   M   lt run program gt

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Here is  based on the other answers  a very simple script that watches an already running process  You just run it with the pid of the process you want to watch as the argument      usr bin env bash  pid  1  while ps  pid  gt  dev null do     ps -o vsz    pid      sleep 1 done   sort -n   tail -n1   Example usage   max mem usage sh 23423

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Please be sure to answer the question  Provide details and share your research       Sorry  I am first time here and can only ask questions     Used suggested   valgrind --tool massif --pages-as-heap yes --massif-out-file massif out   test sh  grep mem heap B massif out   sed -e  s mem heap B         1     sort -g   tail -n 1   then   grep mem heap B massif out     mem heap B 1150976 mem heap B 1150976       this is very different from what top command  shows at similar moment   14673 gu27mox   20   0 3280404 468380  19176 R 100 0  2 9   6 08 84 pwanew 3pic com   what are measured units from Valgrind    The  usr bin time -v   test sh never answered     you must directly feed executable to  usr bin time like    usr bin time -v  pwanew 3pic compass 2008florian3 dfunc static  card 0 100-0 141 31212 resubmit1 dat 1 140 1 180   1 140 1 180 31212       Command being timed   pwanew 3pic compass 2008florian3 dfunc static card 0 100-0 141 31212 resubmit1 dat 1 140 1 180 1 140 1 180 31212       User time  seconds   1468 44     System time  seconds   7 37     Percent of CPU this job got  99      Elapsed  wall clock  time  h mm ss or m ss   24 37 14     Average shared text size  kbytes   0     Average unshared data size  kbytes   0     Average stack size  kbytes   0     Average total size  kbytes   0     Maximum resident set size  kbytes   574844     Average resident set size  kbytes   0     Major  requiring I O  page faults  74     Minor  reclaiming a frame  page faults  468880     Voluntary context switches  1190     Involuntary context switches  20534     Swaps  0     File system inputs  81128     File system outputs  1264     Socket messages sent  0     Socket messages received  0     Signals delivered  0     Page size  bytes   4096     Exit status  0

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This is an already answered  old question   but just for the record     I was inspired by Yang s script  and came up with this small tool  named memusg   I simply increased the sampling rate to 0 1 to handle much short living processes   Instead of monitoring a single process  I made it measure rss sum of the process group   Yeah  I write lots of separate programs that work together   It currently works on Mac OS X and Linux   The usage had to be similar to that of time    memusg ls -alR     dev null   It only shows the peak for the moment  but I m interested in slight extensions for recording other  rough  statistics   It s good to have such simple tool for just taking a look before we start any serious profiling

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Edit  Works on Ubuntu 14 04   usr bin time -v command  Make sure to use the full path    Looks like  usr bin time does give you that info  if you pass -v  this is on Ubuntu 8 10    See  e g   Maximum resident set size below       usr bin time -v ls                Command being timed   ls            User time  seconds   0 00         System time  seconds   0 01         Percent of CPU this job got  250          Elapsed  wall clock  time  h mm ss or m ss   0 00 00         Average shared text size  kbytes   0         Average unshared data size  kbytes   0         Average stack size  kbytes   0         Average total size  kbytes   0         Maximum resident set size  kbytes   0         Average resident set size  kbytes   0         Major  requiring I O  page faults  0         Minor  reclaiming a frame  page faults  315         Voluntary context switches  2         Involuntary context switches  0         Swaps  0         File system inputs  0         File system outputs  0         Socket messages sent  0         Socket messages received  0         Signals delivered  0         Page size  bytes   4096         Exit status  0

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Well  if you really want to show the memory peak and some more in-depth statistics i recommend using a profiler such as valgrind  A nice valgrind front-end is alleyoop

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On Linux   Use  usr bin time -v  lt program gt   lt args gt  and look for  Maximum resident set size     Not to be confused with the Bash time built-in command  So use the full path   usr bin time   For example    gt   usr bin time -v   myapp         User time  seconds   0 00                       Maximum resident set size  kbytes   2792                 On BSD  MacOS   Use  usr bin time -l  lt program gt   lt args gt   looking for  maximum resident set size     gt  usr bin time -l   myapp         0 01 real         0 00 user         0 00 sys       1440  maximum resident set size

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Here s a one-liner that doesn t require any external scripts or utilities and doesn t require you to start the process via another program like Valgrind or time  so you can use it for any process that s already running   grep VmPeak  proc  PID status    replace  PID with the PID of the process you re interested in

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Re-inventing the wheel  with hand made bash script  Quick and clean   My use case  I wanted to monitor a linux machine which has less RAM and wanted to take a snapshot of per container usage when it runs under heavy usage      usr bin env bash  threshold  1  echo    date    Y- m- d  H  M  S    Running free memory monitor with threshold  threshold      while true      freePercent  free -m   grep Mem    awk   print   7  2  100          do    if      awk  BEGIN  print     freePercent    lt     threshold            then        echo    date    Y- m- d  H  M  S    Free memory  freePercent  is less than  threshold          free -m        docker stats --no-stream        sleep 60          echo        else        echo    date    Y- m- d  H  M  S    Sufficient free memory available   freePercent     fi   sleep 30  done   Sample output      2017-10-12 13 29 33  Running free memory monitor with threshold 30         2017-10-12 13 29 33  Sufficient free memory available  69 4567       2017-10-12 13 30 03  Sufficient free memory available  69 4567       2017-10-12 16 47 02  Free memory 18 9387  is less than 30       your custom command output

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Use Massif  http   valgrind org docs manual ms-manual html

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Because  usr bin time is not present in many modern distributions  Bash built-in time instead   you can use Busybox time implementation with -v argument  busybox time -v uname -r  It s output is similar to GNU time output  Busybox is pre-installed in most Linux distros  Debian  Ubuntu  etc    If you using Arch Linux  you can install it with  sudo pacman -S busybox

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On macOS  you can use DTrace instead  The  Instruments  app is a nice GUI for that  it comes with XCode afaik

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Heaptrack is KDE tool that has a GUI and text interface  I find it more suitable than valgrind to understand the memory usage of a process because it provides more details and flamegraphs  It s also faster because it does less checking that valgrind  And it gives you the peak memory usage   Anyway  tracking rss and vss is misleading because pages could be shared  that s why that memusg  What you should really do is track the sum of Pss in  proc  pid  smaps or use pmap  GNOME system-monitor used to do so but it was too expensive

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usr bin time maybe does what you want  actually   Something like      usr bin time --format    Xtext  Ddata  Mmax     See time 1  for details

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If the process runs for at least a couple seconds  then you can use the following bash script  which will run the given command line then print to stderr the peak RSS  substitute for rss any other attribute you re interested in    It s somewhat lightweight  and it works for me with the ps included in Ubuntu 9 04  which I can t say for time       usr bin env bash       amp    Run the given command line in the background  pid    peak 0 while true  do   sleep 1   sample    ps -o rss   pid 2 gt   dev null      break   let peak  sample  gt  peak   sample   peak  done echo  Peak   peak  1 gt  amp 2

[linux] Peak memory usage of a linux/unix process

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