Linux – Find out the total memory allocated for a particular process in Ubuntu

linuxmemoryprocess

How can I find out the total memory allocated for a particular process in Ubuntu?

Best Answer

Try:

pidof bash | xargs ps -o rss,sz,vsz

To find the memory usage of your current bash shell (assuming you're using bash). Change bash to whatever you're investigating. If you're after one specific process, simply use on it's own:

ps -o rss,sz,vsz <process id>

From the man page:

RSS: resident set size, the non-swapped physical memory that a task has used (in kiloBytes).

SZ: size in physical pages of the core image of the process. This includes text, data, and stack space.

VSZ: virtual memory size of the process in KiB (1024-byte units).

The man page for ps will list all the possible arguments to the -o option (there are quite a few to choose from). Instead of -o rss,sz you could use the BSD style v option (no dash) which shows an alternative memory layout.

Related Solutions

How to find out total memory resource usage with ps

You could sum the usage columns with awk:

ps --no-headers -u $USER -o pcpu,rss | awk '{cpu += $1; rss += $2} END {print cpu, rss}'

You might also be interested in the free command for memory usage:

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       2055480    1806596     248884          0      14016     346276
-/+ buffers/cache:    1446304     609176
Swap:      2097148     132980    1964168

The output is in kilobytes (use free --mega for megabytes or free -m for mebibytes). In particular, the used, +/- buffers/cache entry is something like the total physical memory used (by everyone).

Ubuntu – How to find the amount of memory consumed by a process

It sounds like you really need some type of continuous monitoring tool to record statistics like memory usage over time.

I would suggest what you are doing now and repeatedly running the ps command to get size of memory used per process.

You would need a way to parse the output into a human-readable chart or table to show values over time.

Personally, I like this little command I had taken from someone on another forum to show memory usage in a human-readable way:

ps -eo size,pid,user,command --sort -size | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; printf("%13.2f Mb ",hr) } { for ( x=4 ; x<=NF ; x++ ) { printf("%s ",$x) } print "" }'

Best Answer

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How to find out total memory resource usage with ps

Ubuntu – How to find the amount of memory consumed by a process

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