ELC: How much memory are applications really using? [LWN.net]

ELC: How much memory are applications really using?

Posted May 31, 2007 18:31 UTC (Thu) by czr (guest, #13701)
Parent article: ELC: How much memory are applications really using?

It is somewhat funny how nowadays many people working with Linux seem to
reinvent the same wheels, albeit of different color and size :-).

Some time ago I wrote a tool that does reporting based on URES (unique
residest size, RRES - SHARED in this case, which is the same as USS). For
this to work, no kernel patching is required. And of course the number by
itself has the same limitations as the USS.

The tool (written in Python) can be found here:
http://koltsoff.com/pub/meminfo . And another page explaining URES is
mentioned there as well.

The idea of URES/USS has been implemented (at least in the VCS-version)
of KDE ksysguard and based on short email communication will not be
implemented in gnome-system-monitor.

When dealing with systems that are running X server(s), it also is useful
to know that GUI programs often use bitmaps (and other resources) that
are actually accounted in X server at some point, and this will lead to
somewhat skewed memory usage results. This will also apply to any
client-server system in which part of client resources are allocated (and
present in memory of) the server.

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