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How can I determine how much memory a process is using in AIX?

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4 Answers 4

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svmon is the most comprehensive tool for doing this on AIX.

svmon -P <pid>

will get you the full and glorious output. Obviously man svmon helps with interpreting that (just remember, by default, nearly all of the numbers are page counts, which are usually 4KB in size).

You can also get a very nice summary with memory shown in MB using,

svmon -P -O summary=basic,unit=MB

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  • +1 for "just remember, by default, nearly all of the numbers are page counts, which are usually 4KB in size"
    – ivicaa
    Mar 29, 2018 at 9:35
  • include the options filtertype=working,segment=off and you will see the real memory usage.
    – n00b
    Nov 30, 2018 at 13:45
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You can see memory usage with:

ps v PID

where PID is the process ID you are checking.

You can find info about the variables displayed here: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.aix.prftungd/doc/prftungd/mem_usage_determine_ps.htm

You will be more interested in SIZE (Virtual size in paging space in kilobytes of the data section of the process) and RSS (Real-memory size in kilobytes of the process)

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Have you tried topas? It's pretty good for that sort of thing.

You can also try nmon but it's third party, so you'll have to download and compile it.

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Have you tried:

ps -p PID -o command,size

where PID is the process ID that you're interested in?

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  • Do I type literally "command,size"?
    – C. Ross
    Oct 6, 2009 at 18:25
  • Yes, those are the field names for the output option: -o
    – Dennis Williamson
    Oct 6, 2009 at 19:12
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    This doesnt work for me, I get the error: ps: 0509-048 Flag -o was used with invalid list.
    – Andrew Brennan
    Nov 21, 2016 at 11:09
  • @AndrewBrennan: try ps -p PID -o comm,rss
    – Dennis Williamson
    Nov 21, 2016 at 17:06

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