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Timeline for Measuring RAM usage of a program

Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0

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S May 5, 2022 at 5:47 history suggested froque CC BY-SA 4.0
fixed tstime url
May 4, 2022 at 22:14 review Suggested edits
S May 5, 2022 at 5:47
Aug 30, 2020 at 18:06 comment added maxschlepzig @PeterMortensen it's the resident set size
Aug 30, 2020 at 16:58 comment added Peter Mortensen What is "RSS" in this context?
May 2, 2015 at 12:56 comment added Vladimir Panteleev @vonbrand Most use cases of measuring a process's memory usage will want to measure un-shared anonymous pages, which should be very predictable with the same input.
Jan 23, 2013 at 19:50 comment added vonbrand @maxschlepzig, it may well compute some random values, that doesn't mean they mean what you think they mean: The resident set is just the pages in the process' address space that are currently in memory. That is not the "memory used by this process", it includes whatever it is sharing.
Jan 23, 2013 at 19:46 comment added maxschlepzig @vonbrand, how the Linux-Kernel computes the RSS/VSS values is well-defined.
Jan 23, 2013 at 16:05 comment added vonbrand "RAM usage by the process" isn't a well-defined value: If there are several instances of the same program running, they share the executable. Most programs share glibc (and other assorted libraries, they are called "shared" for something). Many daemons load configuration into memory and fork(2) children, who then share the configuration data. Then there is data in readahead/writebehind buffers managed by the kernel. And then there are services that are a herd of loosely coupled processes (think of your desktop environment and all its applets and background stuff).
Aug 22, 2011 at 12:00 vote accept Ole Tange
Aug 22, 2011 at 12:00 comment added Ole Tange I like it. It even did The Right Thing with ./tstime -t bash -c 'perl -e "\$a=\"x\"x100000000;\$b=\$a.\$a;\$b=\"\";\$a=\"\";sleep 10;"'
Aug 16, 2011 at 19:38 history answered maxschlepzig CC BY-SA 3.0