Get memory usage of a process under Linux

Finding out the memory usage of a process under Linux can be a bit confusing. That is because Linux doesn’t have one number for a process’ memory usage.

It has a bunch of different figures for a process’ memory usage! The different numbers include or exclude the virtual memory or swap usage that does not count towards a process’ physical memory usage.

The number that tells you the physical memory or main memory usage is the resident set size. You can see the resident set size for a process using this command:

ps -C <process name> -O rss

For example on CentOS you can find out the process size of the Apache processes using this command:

ps -C httpd -O rss

The output should be like this:

  PID   RSS S TTY          TIME COMMAND
 7409 23740 S ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
 7416  5484 S ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
 7903  8580 S ?        00:00:30 /usr/sbin/httpd

The RSS column tells you the amount of non-swaped physical memory the process is using in KB. At least that is the theory. Often parts of physical memory are shared between processes so the numbers don’t always add up. In fact most processes use shared libraries that are only loaded into memory once and shared among all processes that use them. To find out the amount of non-shared memory a process is using you use this command:

ps -C <process-name> -O size

You will get output like this:

PID    SZ S TTY          TIME COMMAND
 7804 20964 S ?        00:00:02 /usr/sbin/httpd
 7835 12692 S ?        00:00:00 /usr/sbin/httpd
 7903  3024 S ?        00:00:30 /usr/sbin/httpd

The SZ column tells you the amount of private memory a process is using in kilobytes.

But how to find out exactly how much RAM a set of processes like Apache are using? Well the answer is that it’s complicated. I try to estimate memory usage using this script:

#!/bin/bash
ps -C $1 -O rss | gawk '{ count ++; sum += $2 }; END {count --; print "Number of processes =",count; print "Memory usage per process =",sum/1024/count, "MB"; print "Total memory usage =", sum/1024, "MB" ;};'

Save it as psmem.sh and run it like this:

[admin@serve3 ~]$ psmem httpd
Number of processes = 3
Memory usage per process = 9.83464 MB
Total memory usage = 29.5039 MB

Source: http://abdussamad.com/