The Home of C&P Software on the Web

Linux - Per Process Memory Usage

This is a quick tutorial to find out how much memory each process is actually taking in the Linux environment.

The inputs to this section were obtained with the command:

        ps -eo pid,ppid,rss,vsize,pcpu,pmem,cmd -ww –sort=pid

The command “ps” is a c program that reads the “/proc” filesystem.  There are two elements that are useful when determining the per process memory usage. They are:

    a.  RSS
    b.  VSZ

A graph of RSS per unit time will show how much RAM the process is using over time.  A graph of VSZ per unit time will show how large the process is over time.