Question

I am writing small process monitor script in Perl by reading values from Proc file system. Right now I am able to fetch number of threads, process state, number of bytes read and write using /proc/[pid]/status and /proc/[pid]/io files. Now I want to calculate the memory usage of a process. After searching, I came to know memory usage will be present /proc/[pid]/statm. But I still can’t figure out what are necessary fields needed from that file to calculate the memory usage. Can anyone help me on this? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You likely want resident or size. From kernel.org.

• size total program size
  • This is the whole program, including stuff never swapped in
• resident resident set size
  • Stuff in RAM at the current moment (this does not include pages swapped out)