Memory Usage by UID (Unix)

Question

I need the best way to get the SUM of the total RAM usage for a given UID (Unix).

Whatever technique you use, remember that some processes will be running as specific security contexts other than one of your users. For instance Apache will generally run as "nobody" or "www-data" or similar, including any CGI/PHP/other scripts unless you use something like suExec. Other server processes (such as mySQL) similarly will run as a single special user so not be counted against your human user's memory use. — David Spillett, Dec 23 '09 at 22:03

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 13:55

3

It will always be pretty inaccurate because of shared pages. However smem should be able to generate you such report.

answered Dec 23 '09 at 13:55

Michal Čihař

smem looks good. I'd like to re-iterate that shared pages are big: e.g. on modern redhat systems, lots of things will mmap the locale database of about 90Mb, for tiny programs like each shell that runs. So adding up vmsize*processes will be misleading. – pjc50 Jan 28 '10 at 16:08

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 15:01

As Michal says, this will be inaccurate due to shared pages, but if you wanted to you could build a script around a ps command

For example the couple of liner below would print out the virtual memory used by the UID 500 in KB:

#!/bin/bash
SUM=0
for MEM in `ps -u 500 -o vsize --no-headers`; do SUM=$((SUM+$MEM)); done
echo $SUM

Ewan

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 23 '09 at 16:09

1

I believe atop can do per-user statistics.

answered Dec 23 '09 at 16:09

Anonymous

3 Answers3