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

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.

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

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.

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

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 =>  (0x00ccb000)
librt.so.1 => /lib/librt.so.1 (0x06bc7000)
libacl.so.1 => /lib/libacl.so.1 (0x00230000)
libselinux.so.1 => /lib/libselinux.so.1 (0x00162000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00b40000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00cb4000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00b1d000)
libattr.so.1 => /lib/libattr.so.1 (0x00229000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00cae000)
libsepol.so.1 => /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.

I am using Arch Linux and there's this wonderful package called ps_mem:

ps_mem -p <pid>

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
=============================================

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 "memory usage" 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

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.

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.

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 ;)

Given some of the answers (thanks thomasrutter), 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 "swap = "swap/1024" PSS = "pss/1024}'

Or for libvirt;

sudo smem | awk '/libvirt/{swap += $5; pss += $7;} END {print "swap = "swap/1024" PSS = "pss/1024}'

This will give you the total in MB like so;

swap = 0 PSS = 2096.92

swap = 224.75 PSS = 421.455

Tested on ubuntu 16.04 through 20.04.