How to measure actual memory usage of an application or process?

Question

**This question is covered [here][1] in great detail.** How do you measure the memory usage of an application or process in Linux? From the blog article of [Understanding memory usage on Linux][2], `ps` is not an accurate tool to use for this intent. > **Why `ps` is "wrong"** > > Depending on how you look at it, `ps` is not reporting the real memory usage of processes. What it is really doing is showing how much real memory each process would take up __if it were the only process running__. Of course, a typical Linux machine has several dozen processes running at any given time, which means that the VSZ and RSS numbers reported by `ps` are almost definitely *wrong*. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/63166/15161 [2]: http://virtualthreads.blogspot.com/2006/02/understanding-memory-usage-on-linux.html

Answer 1

Install smem. smem gives you memory reports on Linux systems, it reports proportional set size (PSS), and is a way more meaningful metric than RSS, which will consistently overestimate memory consumption.

You can look at the documentation for smem, but smem -t, and smem -tw for applications, and system-wide output should work and service for your request. Attached is a video showing its use.

Hope this helps.