Process Memory Usage using smaps

I’m digging into a mail server and trying to figure out the actual memory usage of some processes. ‘ps’ only gives a little information, which may or may not be incredibly useful:

[root@mail tmp]# ps aux|grep someprocess
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     14368  0.0  0.0   3884   668 pts/0    R+   11:26   0:00 someprocess

From that you can see the VSZ and RSS. I’m not totally sure what exactly those include, but I’ve learned enough to know that they may include the size of shared libraries and things that aren’t unique to this process. Upon trying to find out a little more, I came across this post which explained it well, and has a simple perl script that breaks it down even further:

http://bmaurer.blogspot.com/2006/03/memory-usage-with-smaps.html

When running that smem.pl script with a PID, it produces something like this:

[root@mail1 tmp]# ./smem.pl 14291
VMSIZE:       9840 kb
RSS:          3692 kb total
              1892 kb shared
               816 kb private clean
               984 kb private dirty

From that, you can see how much of the memory usage is ‘Private’ and therefore unique to this process. This is the best way that I have found to view actual memory usage that is unique to a given process.