Re: "ps -o %mem" and free memory in Linux

[Fabrice BAUZAC-STEHLY <noon@mykolab.com>]

Victor Sudakov writes:

> I summed up with awk the values of %mem, which are supposed to be "ratio
> of the process's resident set size  to the physical memory", correct?
>
> In my understanding, the value of %mem should indicate how much physical
> memory is spent on the "individual" part of the process, otherwise the
> parameter is either useless or misdocumented.

No, in resident memory you can find memory private to a process as well
as memory shared between processes.

And in memory private to a process, you can find resident memory and
non-resident memory.

According to Linux's Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt, we can find
this information in /proc/PID/status:

      VmData   size of private data segments
e.g.  VmData:  123004 kB

This looks like the amount of private memory, but I'm not sure.

--
Fabrice BAUZAC-STEHLY
PGP 015AE9B25DCB0511D200A75DE5674DEA514C891D