up vote 1 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

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

link|improve this question
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
feedback

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

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

link|improve this answer
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
feedback
up vote 2 down vote

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

link|improve this answer
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

I believe atop can do per-user statistics.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.