Finding memory use in procfs?

paulehoffman · Feb 19, 2015

Greetings again. I want to see how much memory is being used by the current process. That doesn't seem to be one of the items in /proc/curproc/status, and I'm not sure if I can read /proc/curproc/map correctly to see how much memory total is being used. Is this available in some consistent place (other than top(1))?

junovitch@ · Feb 19, 2015

I'm traveling and don't have a Linux box available to confirm this, but does procstat -r <PID> show you what you need? General procstat(1) is the tool to get information about processes that you would get through /proc on Linux.

paulehoffman · Feb 20, 2015

I'm assuming "Linux" is a typo because the forum is for FreeBSD (and there is no procstat on Linux). Still, I'm not seeing a value in
procstat -r
that is "the total memory used by this process".

junovitch@ · Feb 20, 2015

Sorry about that, I've answered a couple questions on a FreeBSD equivalent for what is in a Linux /proc and my mind stuck "Linux" into your questions as I read it. The procstat -r <PID> shows RSS which matches RES in top. Are you just looking for what's under the size column? There might be a ps(1) flag for that.

tobik@ · Feb 20, 2015

You can use ps(1) to get individual columns you see in top: ps -o rss,pmem,vsize $pid

paulehoffman · Feb 20, 2015

junovitch said:
The procstat -r <PID> shows RSS which matches RES in top.

Er, no, procstat it shows maximum RSS, which doesn't change after memory is freed and top shows lower memory use.

junovitch said:
Are you just looking for what's under the size column? There might be a ps(1) flag for that.

paulehoffman · Feb 20, 2015

tobik said:
You can use ps(1) to get individual columns you see in top: ps -o rss,pmem,vsize $pid

Thanks, that looks exactly right.

Beeblebrox · Feb 20, 2015

You might like this nifty perl script. Save it as ~/bin/free and make it executable (obviously).