this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
994 points (99.2% liked)

linuxmemes

21198 readers
939 users here now

Hint: :q!

Sister communities:

Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
    • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
    • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.

    • Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
    poopsmith@lemmy.world
    zephyr@lemmy.world
    rtxn@lemmy.world
    994
    Htop too (lemm.ee)
    submitted 8 months ago by sag@lemm.ee to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
    34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     
    you are viewing a single comment's thread
    view the rest of the comments
    [โ€“] henfredemars@infosec.pub 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

    How do you measure how much memory a process is using?

    Shared libraries. Shared memory. Virtual. Physical. Memory mapped files. Some applications depend heavily on the availability of the file system cache for good performance, so should you consider that memory technically in use by that process? What if a process is providing a service to other applications and allocates memory on behalf of those apps to provide those services? If I ask the kernel to allocate lots of things for me to do my job should that really be my memory?

    There are popular measures to get an idea of the memory consumed by a process, but none can tell the whole truth and nothing but.

    I.e. could be the dress.

    [โ€“] agent_flounder@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Hmm. It's been a hot minute (ok 30 years) since I learned about this stuff and I don't know how it works in Linux in excruciating detail. Just the general idea.

    So I would be curious to know if I am off base.. but I would guess that, since the kernel is in charge of memory allocation, memory mapping, shared libraries, shared memory, and virtualization, that it simply keeps track of all the associated info.

    Info includes the virtual memory pages it allocates to a process, which of those pages is mapped to physical memory vs swap, the working set size, mapping of shared memory into process virtual memory, and the memory the kernel has reserved for shared libraries.

    I don't think it is necessary to find out how much is "technically in use" by a process. That seems philosophical.

    The job of the OS is all just resource management and whether the systems available physical memory is used up or not. Because if the system spends too much time swapping memory pages in and out, it slows down everything. Shared memory is accounted for correctly in managing all that.

    Maybe I am not understanding your point, but the file system is a different resource than memory so a file system cache (like a browser used) has zero impact on or relevance to memory usage as far as resource management goes.