memory usage by some apps - is this normal ?

[Chu Jeang Tan]

A process may use a large amount of memory, but only a small portion
is being actively used.

In windows the virtual size is meaningless as it is just the
"promised" space for the process, which isn't necessarily mapped to
memory or swap. In linux, from my 10 mins of googling, seems that the
virtual size means the actual total memory used by the process
(memory+swap). If this is the case, thunderbird has 143m in swap  12m
in memory using a total of 155m.

This may be useful:
http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-mm/2003-03/msg00077.html


5.  Per Process Memory Usage

    The inputs to this section were obtained with the command:

        ps -eo pid,ppid,rss,vsize,pcpu,pmem,cmd -ww --sort=pid

    The command "ps" is a c program that reads the "/proc"
    filesystem.

    There are two elements that are useful when determining the per
    process memory usage. They are:

    a.  RSS
    b.  VSIZE

    A graph of RSS per unit time will show how much RAM the process is
    using over time.

    A graph of VSIZE per unit time will show how large the process is
    over time.



On 4/1/07, David Timms <dtimms at iinet.net.au> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> With updated fc6, I have left my PC on for the last few days, and
> noticed it was really slow {I was doing a nice'd clamscan of the whole
> disk}. The machine has 512MB ram, but just before I took this text
> capture, I had firefox running virt=260MB {this had also caused java_vm
> to be running virt=230MB} ie 512MB ram just for these two - does this
> seem normal ?
> =====
> top - 06:24:42 up 1 day, 18:55,  3 users,  load average: 0.58, 0.84, 1.57
> Tasks: 142 total,   1 running, 141 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  3.0%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 95.3%id,  0.0%wa,  0.3%hi,  0.3%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem:    514160k total,   298600k used,   215560k free,     5172k buffers
> Swap:  1859808k total,   236808k used,  1623000k free,   145220k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>
>  4379 18   0  155m  12m 5960 S  0.0  2.5   2:03.21 thunderbird-bin
>  3176 15   0  133m 1144  324 S  0.0  0.2   0:04.03 mysqld
>  3728 15   0  124m  13m 4496 S  0.3  2.7   1:09.55 nautilus
>  3822 15   0  101m  748  748 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.26 trashapplet
>  3751 15   0 89664 6476 1520 S  0.0  1.3   0:21.98 beagled
>  3949 15   0 86840 9704 3500 S  1.3  1.9   0:40.55 gnome-terminal
>  3726 23   0 82188 4220 2192 S  0.0  0.8   0:07.21 gnome-panel
>  4017 16   0 81380  560  560 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.07 evolution-data-
>  3877 15   0 81072 3060 1828 S  0.0  0.6   2:36.41 clock-applet
>  3618 15   0 73008  22m 3476 S  1.7  4.6  27:05.54 Xorg
>  3791 15   0 66888 5964 4180 S  0.0  1.2   0:41.61 wnck-applet
>  3879 15   0 66160 1064  804 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.90 mixer_applet2
>  3710 15   0 65268 1256  920 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.96 gnome-power-man
>  3753 15   0 63296 1228  844 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.73 nm-applet
>  3978 18   0 58344 1904 1188 S  0.0  0.4   0:02.95 notification-da
>  3732 23   0 48748  492  492 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.18 bonobo-activati
>  3738 24   0 44344 1012  808 S  0.0  0.2   0:01.09 eggcups
>  4701 30  15 35740  14m 7624 S  0.0  2.9   0:01.63 beagled-helper
>  3701 15   0 33948 1664 1176 S  0.0  0.3   0:07.33 gnome-settings-
>  1952 15   0 33816  17m 2252 S  0.0  3.5   7:14.16 yum-updatesd
>  3748 15   0 25140 3856 2228 S  0.0  0.7   0:00.63 puplet
>  2923 18   0 22936  456  348 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.36 pcscd
> =====
> Thanks for any pointers or comparison values. I notice that at least
> clock-applet is no longer consuming tonnes of memory {another machine
> after being up 60 days was using virt 800+MB just for clock applet}.
>
> DaveT
>
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-- 
Chu Jeang Tan
chujtan at gmail.com