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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Memory Used By a program

ps ( process based ) command helps in you in identifying the Memory Used by a program.The Virtual Size , Resident Set Size are two important factors of a Process which tells you about the amount of the Memory Being used by a Program.
When we use ps aux
USER     PID   %CPU %MEM VSZ       RSS    TTY STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root002 28453  0.0       1.9   459768 80872    ?    Sl      May03 7:35  java
root002 29118  0.0       5.1   933384 215696  ?    Sl      Jul29   4:01  java
root002 32506  0.0       3.4   904408 143832  ?    Sl      Jul29   1:20  java

VSZ : Virtual Set Size is the total amount of Memory in swap and also in RAM. This is in KB's.
RSS : is Resident Set Size, this is the non-swapped physical memory used by process in KB's
SHR : Indicates how much of the VIRT memory is actual share able or libraries.
If the VSZ increases over time , then there is a memory leak . We need to check our code for possible leaks.
If the Virtual size of your tomcat process is the same after a restart, or grows to a fixed point and doesn't get any larger, you don't have a classic memory leak: Your application just likes to use a lot of memory.
Most programs running in linux uses shared libraries. Please note that VSZ and RSS will be showing the memory used by shared libraries along with the process. Since a shared library used by one process could be used by another process without duplication, this would result in the over accounting of memory.
To get a Clear idea on how much memory is being used we can use the 'pmap' command which gives the memory utilization of all libraries and process in separate way.

Happy learning , More To Come :-)