Getting memory footprint of a process

[slyadams]

I've written a data cache that loads a bunch of data from a database and loads it into memory so front end applications can query the data much faster.

My problem is accurately finding out the memory footprint of the process (mainly, the data footprint). I have tried using top, and catting both /proc/PID/statm and /proc/PID/status with no real luck. For example, I perform a load and get the following results:

cat statm:

328394 290990 399 30 0 324378 0

cat status:

VmSize: 1313576 kB
VmLck: 0 kB
VmRSS: 1163960 kB
VmData: 1297492 kB
VmStk: 20 kB
VmExe: 121 kB
VmLib: 3483 kB
StaBrk: 00573000 kB
Brk: 4c4dd000 kB
StaStk: 7fbffff9b0 kB


top:

VIRT RES SHR
1282m 1.1g 1596


Top and status seem to agree with each other in the region of 1.3GB (smstat reports about 300MB!), but when I've performed other small size tests (e.g. creating 5m element array, 50m element array etc.), statm seems to return the most sane results.

Does anyone have any detailed knowledge of this and give me a hand?

Cheers,

Si

[bleurose]

I think you are missing something here. /proc/pid/statm reports its numbers in pages (4096 byte chunks) and /proc/pid/status reports its numbers in kb (1024 byte chunks). Therefore, the number 328394 in pages is the same as 1313576 in kb (328394 x 4 = 1313576). The numbers are identical.

I don't think you have any problem here at all.