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

Question

This question is covered here in great detail  How do you measure the memory usage of an application or process in Linux  From the blog article of Understanding memory usage on Linux  ps is not an accurate tool to use for this intent   Why ps is  quot wrong quot  Depending on how you look at it  ps is not reporting the real memory usage of processes  What it is really doing is showing how much real memory each process would take up if it were the only process running  Of course  a typical Linux machine has several dozen processes running at any given time  which means that the VSZ and RSS numbers reported by ps are almost definitely wrong

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If your code is in C or C   you might be able to use getrusage   which returns you various statistics about memory and time usage of your process   Not all platforms support this though and will return 0 values for the memory-use options   Instead you can look at the virtual file created in  proc  pid  statm  where  pid  is replaced by your process id  You can obtain this from getpid      This file will look like a text file with 7 integers  You are probably most interested in the first  all memory use  and sixth  data memory use  numbers in this file

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This is an excellent summary of the tools and problems  archive org link I ll quote it  so that more devs will actually read it   If you want to analyse memory usage of the whole system or to thoroughly analyse memory usage of one application  not just its heap usage   use exmap  For whole system analysis  find processes with the highest effective usage  they take the most memory in practice  find processes with the highest writable usage  they create the most data  and therefore possibly leak or are very ineffective in their data usage   Select such application and analyse its mappings in the second listview  See exmap section for more details  Also use xrestop to check high usage of X resources  especially if the process of the X server takes a lot of memory  See xrestop section for details  If you want to detect leaks  use valgrind or possibly kmtrace  If you want to analyse heap  malloc etc   usage of an application  either run it in memprof or with kmtrace  profile the application and search the function call tree for biggest allocations  See their sections for more details

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If the process is not using up too much memory  either because you expect this to be the case  or some other command has given this initial indication   and the process can withstand being stopped for a short period of time  you can try to use the gcore command  gcore  lt pid gt   Check the size of the generated core file to get a good idea how much memory a particular process is using  This won t work too well if process is using hundreds of megabytes  or gigabytes  as the core generation could take several seconds or minutes to be created depending on I O performance   During the core creation the process is stopped  or  quot frozen quot   to prevent memory changes   So be careful  Also make sure the mount point where the core is generated has plenty of disk space and that the system will not react negatively to the core file being created in that particular directory

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The below command line will give you the total memory used by the various process running on the Linux machine in MB  ps -eo size pid user command --sort -size   awk    hr  1 1024   printf  quot  13 2f Mb  quot  hr      for   x 4   x lt  NF   x       printf  quot  s  quot   x    print  quot  quot       awk   total total    1  END  print total

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A good test of the more  quot real world quot  usage is to open the application  run vmstat -s  and check the  quot active memory quot  statistic  Close the application  wait a few seconds  and run vmstat -s again  However much active memory was freed was in evidently in use by the application

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Use time  Not the Bash builtin time  but the one you can find with which time  for example  usr bin time  Here s what it covers  on a simple ls     usr bin time --verbose ls       Command being timed   quot ls quot  User time  seconds   0 00 System time  seconds   0 00 Percent of CPU this job got  0  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   2372 Average resident set size  kbytes   0 Major  requiring I O  page faults  1 Minor  reclaiming a frame  page faults  121 Voluntary context switches  2 Involuntary context switches  9 Swaps  0 File system inputs  256 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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Check out this shell script to check memory usage by application in Linux  It is also available on GitHub and in a version without paste and bc

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It is hard to tell for sure  but here are two  quot close quot  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

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ps -eo size pid user command --sort -size         awk    hr  1 1024   printf   13 2f Mb   hr      for   x 4   x lt  NF   x       printf   s    x    print              cut -d    -f2   cut -d  -  -f1   Use this as root and you can get a clear output for memory usage by each process   OUTPUT EXAMPLE        0 00 Mb COMMAND    1288 57 Mb  usr lib firefox    821 68 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     762 82 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     588 36 Mb  usr sbin mysqld     547 55 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     523 92 Mb  usr lib tracker tracker    476 59 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     446 41 Mb  usr bin gnome    421 62 Mb  usr sbin libvirtd     405 11 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     302 60 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     291 46 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     284 56 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     238 93 Mb  usr lib tracker tracker    223 21 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     197 99 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     194 07 Mb conky     191 92 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     190 72 Mb  usr bin mongod     169 06 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     155 11 Mb  usr bin gnome    136 02 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     125 98 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium     103 98 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium      93 22 Mb  usr lib tracker tracker     89 21 Mb  usr lib gnome     80 61 Mb  usr bin gnome     77 73 Mb  usr lib evolution evolution     76 09 Mb  usr lib evolution evolution     72 21 Mb  usr lib gnome     69 40 Mb  usr lib evolution evolution     68 84 Mb nautilus     68 08 Mb zeitgeist     60 97 Mb  usr lib tracker tracker     59 65 Mb  usr lib evolution evolution     57 68 Mb apt     55 23 Mb  usr lib gnome     53 61 Mb  usr lib evolution evolution     53 07 Mb  usr lib gnome     52 83 Mb  usr lib gnome     51 02 Mb  usr lib udisks2 udisksd      50 77 Mb  usr lib evolution evolution     50 53 Mb  usr lib gnome     50 45 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     50 36 Mb  usr lib packagekit packagekitd      50 14 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     48 95 Mb  usr bin Xwayland  1024      46 21 Mb  usr bin gnome     42 43 Mb  usr bin zeitgeist     42 29 Mb  usr lib gnome     41 97 Mb  usr lib gnome     41 64 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     41 63 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     41 55 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     41 48 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     39 87 Mb  usr bin python  usr bin chrome     37 45 Mb  usr lib xorg Xorg vt2      36 62 Mb  usr sbin NetworkManager      35 63 Mb  usr lib caribou caribou      34 79 Mb  usr lib tracker tracker     33 88 Mb  usr sbin ModemManager      33 77 Mb  usr lib gnome     33 61 Mb  usr lib upower upowerd      33 53 Mb  usr sbin gdm3      33 37 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     33 36 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     33 23 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     33 15 Mb  usr lib at     33 15 Mb  usr lib at     30 03 Mb  usr lib colord colord      29 62 Mb  usr lib apt methods https      28 06 Mb  usr lib zeitgeist zeitgeist     27 29 Mb  usr lib policykit     25 55 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     25 55 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     25 23 Mb  usr lib accountsservice accounts     25 18 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd      25 15 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     25 15 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     25 12 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     25 10 Mb  usr lib gnome     25 10 Mb  usr lib gnome     25 07 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd      24 99 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfs     23 26 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium      22 09 Mb  usr bin pulseaudio      19 01 Mb  usr bin pulseaudio      18 62 Mb  sd     18 46 Mb  sd     18 30 Mb  sbin init      18 17 Mb  usr sbin rsyslogd      17 50 Mb gdm     17 42 Mb gdm     17 09 Mb  usr lib dconf dconf     17 09 Mb  usr lib at     17 06 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     16 98 Mb  usr lib at     16 91 Mb  usr lib gdm3 gdm     16 86 Mb  usr lib gvfs gvfsd     16 86 Mb  usr lib gdm3 gdm     16 85 Mb  usr lib dconf dconf     16 85 Mb  usr lib dconf dconf     16 73 Mb  usr lib rtkit rtkit     16 69 Mb  lib systemd systemd     13 13 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium      13 13 Mb  usr lib chromium chromium      10 92 Mb anydesk       8 54 Mb  sbin lvmetad       7 43 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 82 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 77 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 73 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 66 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 64 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 63 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 62 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 51 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 25 Mb  usr sbin apache2       6 22 Mb  usr sbin apache2       3 92 Mb bash       3 14 Mb bash       2 97 Mb bash       2 95 Mb bash       2 93 Mb bash       2 91 Mb bash       2 86 Mb bash       2 86 Mb bash       2 86 Mb bash       2 84 Mb bash       2 84 Mb bash       2 45 Mb  lib systemd systemd      2 30 Mb  sd      2 28 Mb  usr bin dbus      1 84 Mb  usr bin dbus      1 46 Mb ps       1 21 Mb openvpn hackthebox ovpn       1 16 Mb  sbin dhclient       1 16 Mb  sbin dhclient       1 09 Mb  lib systemd systemd       0 98 Mb  sbin mount ntfs  dev sda3  media n0bit4 Data       0 97 Mb  lib systemd systemd       0 96 Mb  lib systemd systemd       0 89 Mb  usr sbin smartd       0 77 Mb  usr bin dbus      0 76 Mb su       0 76 Mb su       0 76 Mb su     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User · Answer

There isn t any easy way to calculate this  But some people have tried to get some good answers   ps mem py ps mem py at GitHub

User · Answer

Note  this works 100  well only when memory consumption increases If you want to monitor memory usage by given process  or group of processed sharing common name  e g  google-chrome  you can use my bash-script  while true  do ps aux   awk     print  5   11       grep chrome   sort -n  gt   tmp a txt  sleep 1  diff  tmp  b a  txt  mv  tmp  a b  txt  done   this will continuously look for changes and print them

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I am using Arch Linux and there s this wonderful package called ps mem  ps mem -p  lt pid gt   Example Output   ps mem -S -p   pgrep firefox   Private       Shared     RAM used   Swap used   Program  355 0 MiB    38 7 MiB   393 7 MiB    35 9 MiB   firefox ---------------------------------------------                         393 7 MiB    35 9 MiB

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bin ksh     Returns total memory used by process  1 in kb      See  proc NNNN smaps if you want to do something   more interesting     IFS    n   for line in    lt  proc  1 smaps  do        line     Size  s   S       amp  amp    kb       sh match 1     done  print  kb

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If you want something quicker than profiling with Valgrind and your kernel is older and you can t use smaps  a ps with the options to show the resident set of the process  with ps -o rss command  can give you a quick and reasonable  aproximation  of the real amount of non-swapped memory being used

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Given some of the answers  to get the actual swap and RAM for a single application I came up with the following  say we want to know what  firefox  is using sudo smem   awk   firefox  swap   5  pss   7  END print  quot swap    quot swap 1024 quot  PSS    quot pss 1024   or for libvirt  sudo smem   awk   libvirt  swap   5  pss   7  END print  quot swap    quot swap 1024 quot  PSS    quot pss 1024   this will give you the total in MB like so  swap   0 PSS   2096 92 swap   224 75 PSS   421 455

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While this question seems to be about examining currently running processes  I wanted to see the peak memory used by an application from start to finish  Besides Valgrind  you can use tstime  which is much simpler  It measures the  quot highwater quot  memory usage  RSS and virtual   From this answer

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Beside the solutions listed in the answers  you can use the Linux command  quot top quot   It provides a dynamic real-time view of the running system  and it gives the CPU and memory usage for the whole system  along with for every program  in percentage  top  to filter by a program PID  top -p  lt PID gt   To filter by a program name  top   grep  lt PROCESS NAME gt    quot top quot  provides also some fields such as  VIRT -- Virtual Image  kb   The total amount of virtual memory used by the task RES -- Resident size  kb   The non-swapped physical memory a task has used   RES   CODE   DATA  DATA -- Data Stack size  kb   The amount of physical memory devoted to other than executable code  also known as the  data resident set  size or DRS  SHR -- Shared Mem size  kb   The amount of shared memory used by a task  It simply reflects memory that could be potentially shared with other processes  Reference here

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Try the pmap command   sudo pmap -x  lt process pid gt

User · Answer

Use the in-built System Monitor GUI tool available in Ubuntu

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Last but not least use htop     sudo apt-get update   sudo apt-get install htop   Run htop using below command     htop   Note for newcomers  dollar symbol is used to show we are running command on a terminal

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prox xxx numa maps gives some info there  N0     N1      But this result might be lower than the actual result  as it only count those which have been touched

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Use smem  which is an alternative to ps which calculates the USS and PSS per process  You probably want the PSS   USS - Unique Set Size   This is the amount of unshared memory unique to that process  think of it as U for unique memory    It does not include shared memory   Thus this will under-report the amount of memory a process uses  but it is helpful when you want to ignore shared memory   PSS - Proportional Set Size   This is what you want   It adds together the unique memory  USS   along with a proportion of its shared memory divided by the number of processes sharing that memory   Thus it will give you an accurate representation of how much actual physical memory is being used per process - with shared memory truly represented as shared   Think of the P being for physical memory    How this compares to RSS as reported by ps and other utilities   RSS - Resident Set Size  This is the amount of shared memory plus unshared memory used by each process   If any processes share memory  this will over-report the amount of memory actually used  because the same shared memory will be counted more than once - appearing again in each other process that shares the same memory   Thus it is fairly unreliable  especially when high-memory processes have a lot of forks - which is common in a server  with things like Apache or PHP  FastCGI FPM  processes   Notice  smem can also  optionally  output graphs such as pie charts and the like   IMO you don t need any of that   If you just want to use it from the command line like you might use ps -A v  then you don t need to install the Python and Matplotlib recommended dependency

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Another vote for Valgrind here  but I would like to add that you can use a tool like Alleyoop to help you interpret the results generated by Valgrind  I use the two tools all the time and always have lean  non-leaky code to proudly show for it

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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

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Valgrind can show detailed information  but it slows down the target application significantly  and most of the time it changes the behavior of the application  Exmap was something I didn t know yet  but it seems that you need a kernel module to get the information  which can be an obstacle  I assume what everyone wants to know with respect to  quot memory usage quot  is the following    In Linux  the amount of physical memory a single process might use can be roughly divided into following categories   M a anonymous mapped memory   p private   d dirty    malloc mmapped heap and stack allocated and written memory  c clean    malloc mmapped heap and stack memory once allocated  written  then freed  but not reclaimed yet    s shared   d dirty    malloc mmaped heap could get copy-on-write and shared among processes  edited   c clean    malloc mmaped heap could get copy-on-write and shared among processes  edited    M n named mapped memory   p private   d dirty    file mmapped written memory private  c clean    mapped program library text private mapped    s shared   d dirty    file mmapped written memory shared  c clean    mapped library text shared mapped    Utility included in Android called showmap is quite useful virtual                    shared   shared   private  private size     RSS      PSS      clean    dirty    clean    dirty    object -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- ------------------------------        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 0 00 0                   vsyscall         4        4        0        4        0        0        0                          vdso        88       28       28        0        0        4       24                          stack        12       12       12        0        0        0       12 7909                     lib ld-2 11 1 so       12        4        4        0        0        0        4 89529                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC IDENTIFICATION       28        0        0        0        0        0        0 86661                    usr lib gconv gconv-modules cache        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 87660                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC MEASUREMENT        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 89528                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC TELEPHONE        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 89527                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC ADDRESS        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 87717                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC NAME        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 87873                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC PAPER        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 13879                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC MESSAGES SYS LC MESSAGES        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 89526                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC MONETARY        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 89525                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC TIME        4        0        0        0        0        0        0 11378                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC NUMERIC     1156        8        8        0        0        4        4 11372                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC COLLATE      252        0        0        0        0        0        0 11321                    usr lib locale en US utf8 LC CTYPE      128       52        1       52        0        0        0 7909                     lib ld-2 11 1 so     2316       32       11       24        0        0        8 7986                     lib libncurses so 5 7     2064        8        4        4        0        0        4 7947                     lib libdl-2 11 1 so     3596      472       46      440        0        4       28 7933                     lib libc-2 11 1 so     2084        4        0        4        0        0        0 7995                     lib libnss compat-2 11 1 so     2152        4        0        4        0        0        0 7993                     lib libnsl-2 11 1 so     2092        0        0        0        0        0        0 8009                     lib libnss nis-2 11 1 so     2100        0        0        0        0        0        0 7999                     lib libnss files-2 11 1 so     3752     2736     2736        0        0      864     1872                          heap        24       24       24        0        0        0       24  anon       916      616      131      584        0        0       32                          bin bash -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- -------- ------------------------------    22816     4004     3005     1116        0      876     2012 TOTAL

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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  lt executable gt   lt arguments gt   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

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I would suggest that you use atop  You can find everything about it on this page  It is capable of providing all the necessary KPI for your processes and it can also capture to a file

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I m using htop  it s a very good console program similar to Windows Task Manager

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Three more methods to try    ps aux --sort pmem It sorts the output by  MEM  ps aux   awk   print  2   4   11     sort -k2r   head -n 15 It sorts using pipes  top -a It starts top sorting by  MEM    Extracted from here

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Get Valgrind  Give it your program to run  and it ll tell you plenty about its memory usage  This would apply only for the case of a program that runs for some time and stops  I don t know if Valgrind can get its hands on an already-running process or shouldn t-stop processes such as daemons

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Based on answer to a related question  You may use SNMP to get the memory and CPU usage of a process in a particular device on the network    Requirements   the device running the process should have snmp installed and running snmp should be configured to accept requests from where you will run the script below  it may be configured in file snmpd conf  you should know the process ID  PID  of the process you want to monitor  Notes   HOST-RESOURCES-MIB  hrSWRunPerfCPU is the number of centi-seconds of the total system s CPU resources consumed by this process  Note that on a multi-processor system  this value may increment by more than one centi-second in one centi-second of real  wall clock  time   HOST-RESOURCES-MIB  hrSWRunPerfMem is the total amount of real system memory allocated to this process       Process monitoring script     echo  quot IP   quot  read ip echo  quot specfiy pid   quot  read pid echo  quot interval in seconds  quot  read interval  while   1   do     date     snmpget -v2c -c public  ip HOST-RESOURCES-MIB  hrSWRunPerfCPU  pid     snmpget -v2c -c public  ip HOST-RESOURCES-MIB  hrSWRunPerfMem  pid     sleep  interval  done

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There isn t a single answer for this because you can t pin point precisely the amount of memory a process uses  Most processes under Linux use shared libraries  For instance  let s say you want to calculate memory usage for the  ls  process  Do you count only the memory used by the executable  ls   if you could isolate it   How about libc  Or all these other libraries that are required to run  ls   linux-gate so 1   gt    0x00ccb000  librt so 1   gt   lib librt so 1  0x06bc7000  libacl so 1   gt   lib libacl so 1  0x00230000  libselinux so 1   gt   lib libselinux so 1  0x00162000  libc so 6   gt   lib libc so 6  0x00b40000  libpthread so 0   gt   lib libpthread so 0  0x00cb4000   lib ld-linux so 2  0x00b1d000  libattr so 1   gt   lib libattr so 1  0x00229000  libdl so 2   gt   lib libdl so 2  0x00cae000  libsepol so 1   gt   lib libsepol so 1  0x0011a000   You could argue that they are shared by other processes  but  ls  can t be run on the system without them being loaded  Also  if you need to know how much memory a process needs in order to do capacity planning  you have to calculate how much each additional copy of the process uses  I think  proc PID status might give you enough information of the memory usage at a single time  On the other hand  Valgrind will give you a better profile of the memory usage throughout the lifetime of the program

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

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