[Techtalk] Help with memory units in top (or other ways to monitor per process system resource consumption)

Sarah Newman newmans at sonic.net
Fri Jun 12 16:35:40 UTC 2015


On 06/12/2015 07:56 AM, Terry wrote:
> 1. If you press 'e' while top is running it cycles through the various
> memory display options.  I'm pretty sure kb is the default and the
> lowest division it will go.  Pressing 'E' cycles the total memory but
> again, kb is the lowest division it will go.

Try looking at /proc/self/status, kB is the smallest there too.

I'm not sure how the OS would allocate less than a page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_%28computer_memory%29 to a process.  The page size is
typically 4KiB and I think it can only be larger, not smaller:

$ getconf PAGESIZE
4096




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