memstat - Identify what's using up virtual memory.

memstat [-w]

memstat lists all the processes, executables, and shared libraries that are using up virtual memory.

First, the processes are listed. An amount of memory is shown along with a process ID and the name of the executable which the process is running. The amount of memory shown does not include shared memory: it only includes memory which is private to that process. So, if a process is using a shared library like libc, the memory used to hold that library is not included. The memory used to hold the executable's text-segment is also not included, since that too is shareable.

After the processes, the shared objects are listed. An amount of memory is shown along with the filename of the shared object, followed by a list of the processes using the shared object.

Finally, a grand total is shown. Note that this program shows the amount of virtual (not real) memory used by the various items.

memstat gets its input from the /proc filesystem. This must be compiled into your kernel and mounted for memstat to work. The pathnames shown next to the shared objects are determined by scanning the disk. memstat uses a configuration file, /etc/memstat.conf, to determine which directories to scan. This file should include all the major bin and lib directories in your system, as well as the /dev directory. If you run an executable which is not in one of these directories, it will be listed by memstat as ``[0dev]:<inode>''.

Options

These reports are intended to help identify programs that are using an excessive amount of memory, and to reduce overall memory waste.

/etc/memstat.conf
/proc/*/maps

ps(1), top(1), free(1), vmstat(8), lsof(8), /usr/doc/memstat/memstat-tutorial.txt.gz

If you do the math, you'll see that ps and memstat don't always agree about how much virtual memory a process is using. This is because most processes seem to map certain shared pages twice. memstat counts these pages once, ps counts them twice. I'm not sure which is the ``right'' way to measure it.

The proc filesystem identifies files by their device number and inode number. To be useful, these numbers must be translated back into filenames. This requires searching the disk (and thus the awkward configuration file memstst.conf). There should be some way around this, perhaps by adding the dev/inode info to the locate db?

The stat system call returns a dev_t type, but the proc filesystem contains a device readout in the form of a string. I have improvised a routine to convert the device readout string into a dev_t, but I'm not sure it will work on all architectures.

It is possible to confuse memstat by using mmap in combination with a block-device. In the original version, memstat treated block devices just like any other file, and if you mmap'ed one of them, they would show up on the shared-object list. This worked for mmap'ed hard disks and floppies, but it produced absurd results with block devices like /dev/zero and /dev/mem. As a partial fix, memstat now ignores all mapped block devices, though this may cause memstat to ignore some memory usage.

We really ought to show some real-memory usage statistics, but it's just not there in /proc.

Memory used by the kernel itself is not listed.

Written by Joshua Yelon <jyelon@uiuc.edu> and patched by Bernd Eckenfels <ecki@debian.org>