Runtime Memory Measurement

From eLinux.org
Revision as of 09:01, 14 November 2008 by WillNewton (talk | contribs) (→‎Inaccuracies)
Jump to: navigation, search

This page has a collection of ideas and resources having to do with measuring runtime memory of a Linux system.

Unfortunately, the existing memory measurement techniques do not give a 100% accurate accounting of memory pages (since some pages are counted more than once by some measures). See Accurate Memory Measurement - that page describes techniques (and patches) which can be used to measure the runtime memory more accurately.

Measuring memory in Linux (the basics)

Here are some basic techniques for measuring memory usage in Linux.

'free' and /proc

The 'free' command shows the memory on a machine, in certain categories.

[need explanation of categories here...'man free' doesn't explain the numbers] 


$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        507564     481560      26004          0      68888     185220
-/+ buffers/cache:     227452     280112
Swap:      2136604     105168    2031436


This information is obtained from /proc/meminfo, which has additional details not shown by the 'free' command.

The following is on my machine with 512 Mb RAM, running Linux 2.6.3: 

$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       507564 kB
MemFree:         26004 kB
Buffers:         68888 kB
Cached:         185220 kB
SwapCached:      29348 kB
Active:         342488 kB
Inactive:        32092 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       507564 kB
LowFree:         26004 kB
SwapTotal:     2136604 kB
SwapFree:      2031436 kB
Dirty:              88 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         165648 kB
Slab:            73212 kB
Committed_AS:   343172 kB
PageTables:       2644 kB
VmallocTotal:   524212 kB
VmallocUsed:      7692 kB
VmallocChunk:   516328 kB

See http://lwn.net/Articles/28345/ for a description of these fields

Measuring user process memory use

'ps' fields for memory information

The 'ps' command provides information about the memory usage of processes on a Linux system. However, it is not well documented. Here are some notes on using 'ps' and /proc to view memory usage information on a running Linux system:

meaning of ps fields:

  •  %Mem - percent of memory
  • VSZ - Virtual Size
  • RSS - Resident Set Size
  • SIZE - Equivalent to VSZ
  • others??

'top' fields for memory information

See 'man top':

  •  %MEM -- Memory usage (RES)
      • A task's currently used share of available physical memory.
  • VIRT -- Virtual Image (kb)
      • The total amount of virtual memory used by the task. It includes all code, data and shared libraries plus pages that have been swapped out.
      • VIRT = SWAP + RES
  • SWAP -- Swapped size (kb)
      • The swapped out portion of a task's total virtual memory image.
  • RES -- Resident size (kb)
        • The non-swapped physical memory a task has used.
        • RES = CODE + DATA.
  • CODE -- Code size (kb)
        • The amount of physical memory devoted to executable code, also known as the 'text resident set' size or TRS
  • DATA -- Data+Stack size (kb)
        • The amount of physical memory devoted to other than executable code, also known as the 'data resident set' size or DRS.
  • SHR -- Shared Mem size (kb)
        • The amount of shared memory used by a task. It simply reflects memory that could be potentially shared with other processes.
  • nDRT -- Dirty Pages count
        • The number of pages that have been modified since they were last written to disk. Dirty pages must be written to disk before the corresponding physical memory location can be used for some other virtual page.

Are the following assertions true:??

  • virtual memory usage of a process, excluding shared libs = VIRT - SHR
  • physical memory usage of a process excluding shared libraries = RES - SHR

/proc info

see 'man proc' for detailed information about the files and fields in the /proc filesystem.

/proc/<pid>/statm

/proc/<pid>/statm fields: columns are (in pages):

  • size total program size
  • resident resident set size
  • share shared pages
  • trs text (code)
  • drs data/stack
  • lrs library
  • dt dirty pages

Here an example: 693 406 586 158 0 535 0

/proc/<pid>/status

/proc/<pid>/status fields:

  • Vm Size: 2772 kB
  • Vm Lck: 0 kB - ???
  • Vm RSS: 1624 kB
  • Vm Data: 404 kB
  • Vm Stk: 24 kB
  • Vm Exe: 608 kB
  • Vm Lib: 1440 kB

/proc/<pid>/maps

The process maps shows the actual memory areas that have been mapped into a process' address space, and their permissions.

Example: 

$ cat /proc/25042/maps
08048000-080e0000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 196610     /bin/bash
080e0000-080e6000 rw-p 00097000 03:05 196610     /bin/bash
080e6000-08148000 rwxp 00000000 00:00 0
40000000-40016000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 147471     /lib/ld-2.3.3.so
40016000-40017000 rw-p 00015000 03:05 147471     /lib/ld-2.3.3.so
40017000-40018000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
40018000-40019000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184090     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_IDENTIFICATION
40019000-4001a000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184089     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MEASUREMENT
4001a000-4001b000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184083     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_TELEPHONE
4001b000-4001c000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184091     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_ADDRESS
4001c000-4001d000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184086     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_NAME
4001d000-4001e000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184084     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_PAPER
4001e000-4001f000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184088     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/SYS_LC_MESSAGES
4001f000-40020000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184087     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MONETARY
40020000-40026000 r--p 00000000 03:05 183689     /usr/share/locale/ISO-8859-1/LC_COLLATE
40026000-40027000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184082     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_TIME
40027000-4002a000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 147459     /lib/libtermcap.so.2.0.8
4002a000-4002b000 rw-p 00002000 03:05 147459     /lib/libtermcap.so.2.0.8
4002b000-4002c000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
4002c000-4002e000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 147482     /lib/libdl-2.3.3.so
4002e000-4002f000 rw-p 00001000 03:05 147482     /lib/libdl-2.3.3.so
4002f000-40171000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 147511     /lib/tls/libc-2.3.3.so
40171000-40174000 rw-p 00142000 03:05 147511     /lib/tls/libc-2.3.3.so
40174000-40177000 rw-p 00000000 00:00 0
40177000-40178000 r--p 00000000 03:05 184085     /usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_NUMERIC
40178000-401a4000 r--p 00000000 03:05 183688     /usr/share/locale/ISO-8859-1/LC_CTYPE
401a4000-401a5000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 180462     /usr/lib/gconv/ISO8859-1.so
401a5000-401a6000 rw-p 00001000 03:05 180462     /usr/lib/gconv/ISO8859-1.so
401b3000-401bd000 r-xp 00000000 03:05 147492     /lib/libnss_files-2.3.3.so
401bd000-401be000 rw-p 00009000 03:05 147492     /lib/libnss_files-2.3.3.so
bfffa000-c0000000 rwxp ffffb000 00:00 0
ffffe000-fffff000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0


mem_usage command to consolidate data

David Schleef wrote a program to consolidate the information from /proc/<pid>/maps, and total up each kind of memory for a process.

Here it is: Media:mem_usage (It was obtained from http://www.schleef.org/~ds/mem_usage)

Here is the result of running mem_usage on the process used in the previous example: 

$ ./mem_usage 25042
Backed by file:
  Executable                r-x  2048
  Write/Exec (jump tables)  rwx  0
  RO data                   r--  240
  Data                      rw-  56
  Unreadable                ---  0
  Unknown                        0
Anonymous:
  Writable code (stack)     rwx  416
  Data (malloc, mmap)       rw-  20
  RO data                   r--  0
  Unreadable                ---  4
  Unknown                        0

Inaccuracies

Many of the memory reporting mechanisms for the kernel are inaccurate, due to not recording sufficient information about the true state of the system. Here are some random notes on these inaccuracies. To see information on different methods of getting more accurate memory information, see Accurate Memory Measurement

  • "copy-on-write" pages - an mmap'ed file may be very large in the process address space, but empty until written to.

From Ratboy on Slashdot: 

The mmap() call can map a file (backing store) and allow data to be shared. Memory does
not need to be used until the data is read (or written). And this time, the backing
store doesn't even need swap (because the file is the backing store).

...

A page of code that is shared - may become a page of code that is private. A page of
data that is unwritten doesn't have to exist. Even if it is read! A page of data that
is written may STILL be shared.


From others on Slashdot:

Top will show you the same as ps does, ps reads /proc/<pid>/statm and asks what's going on. The problem on linux is the copy on write principle wich saves heaps of memory, but makes it virtually impossible to figure out what belongs to what. The thing is, when you fork it maps the memory and marks everything as copy on write, when something needs to write to part of the memory, then it will make the copy for each process.

However asking the process how much memory it has allocated will show all memory including stuff that is marked copy on write - that is, I could have 100 processes showing they each use 1.4MB of memory, because they all share the same libray, but in fact, its the same copy they are all using so I'm only using 1.4 MB instead of 140MB (+PCB et. al)

Each thread in a process shows up as consuming the same amount of memory (either this only happens under Linuxthreads or I don't have any threaded applications running on my system).

Device mappings show up as consumed memory (which generates plenty of complaints about the X server). If you want to find out how much memory X is actually using (bytes in cached pixmaps on behalf of each process and sans device mappings), try the program here: http://69.142.116.122/dist/pixmap_mem-1.0.tgz

This contains a tiny program that lists how much memory X is using for other programs by caching pixmaps and a perl script that lists how much memory X is using sans device mappings. }}}

  • pmap is a utility which shows the memory usage of a process (it looks like it just reads and interprets /proc/<pid>/maps).

Someone on Slashdot said: 

pmap *also* overestimates memory usage, because some portion of the mapped address
space isn't actually in use. RSS, on the other hand, only measures memory that is
actually in use, but doesn't distinguish between memory that is shared and memory
that is not. VSZ is the most pessimistic measure, since it includes all mapped
memory, shared and unshared.

Thread local storage memory usage

  • Thread local storage memory usage
    • With conventional implementaion, Stack would be used for Thread Local Storage.
    • This means detail information would be inside in stack and, it's quite difficult to
  catch them from kernel side.

Heap memory usage

  • Heap memory
    • glibc has capability to collect statistics information of heap functions like malloc()
  and other functions like memory leak checking or double free.
        • [need pointers to memory checkers]

Measuring kernel memory use

Kernel Stack Usage

  • Tim is adding a stack checking function to KFT (See Kernel Function Trace)
      • This new feature has not yet been published
  • Recent -mm tree added stack-corruption-detector.patch (8th March, 2006)
  • The scripts/checkstack.pl script in the kernel tree will show the functions with the largest static stack footprint.
  • Enabling CONFIG_DEBUG_STACKOVERFLOW in the kernel will enable checking for low-stack situations in the irq handler.
  • Enabling CONFIG_4KSTACKS will cause stack overflows to occur more frequently, particularly with certain kernel code such as XFS enabled.

General kernel memory use

  • http://www.halobates.de/memorywaste.pdf - Great paper by Andi Kleen, of SUSE Labs, about dynamic memory usage of Linux systems
  • Check /proc/slabinfo to find how much memory is being used by the kernel SLAB allocator (or SLUB or SLOB, depending on what is enabled).
Retrieved from "https://elinux.org/index.php?title=Runtime_Memory_Measurement&oldid=7768"