Why 'ps' and 'top' are wrong? These tools often include the shared memory used by shared libraries rather than the actual private memory of the process. If we were to investigate something like memory leak management, we would want to know the real memory.
One easy way to get the true usage is by building a memory map using the 'pmap' tool and get the private writeable memory. This is done by using this command:
pmap -d <PID>
Let's see a typical example where we want to find the memory used by the 'sqlplus' process. The 'ps' tool reports around 41MB in total (Virtual Size: 33164KB, Resident Size: 8356KB). It looks quite big for a single 'sqlplus' process - infact it is big because 'ps' is also reporting the size of the shared libraries:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND oracle 30409 0.0 0.0 33164 8356 pts/0 S+ 2011 0:00 sqlplus
Now, let's use pmap to determine the true memory usage:
$ pmap -d 30409 30409: sqlplus Address Kbytes Mode Offset Device Mapping 00110000 1552 r-x-- 0000000000000000 068:00003 libnnz11.so 00294000 148 rwx-- 0000000000184000 068:00003 libnnz11.so 002b9000 4 rwx-- 00000000002b9000 000:00000 [ anon ] 002ba000 76 r-x-- 0000000000000000 068:00003 libnsl-2.5.so 002cd000 4 r-x-- 0000000000012000 068:00003 libnsl-2.5.so ... b7f17000 152 rw--- 00000000b7f17000 000:00000 [ anon ] bf8e6000 80 rwx-- 00000000bf8e6000 000:00000 [ stack ] bf8fa000 4 rw--- 00000000bf8fa000 000:00000 [ anon ] mapped: 33164K writeable/private: 2752K shared: 424K
Pmap reports that the private memory of the 'sqlplus' process is 2.7MB (writeable/private: 2752K ) - this is infact the true memory utlised by the process - very much different from the 41MB reported earlier!
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