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

Question

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

Solution 1

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

Solution 2

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)

Solution 3

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.

Comments

[C. Ross]

Do I type literally "command,size"?

[Dennis Williamson]

Yes, those are the field names for the output option: -o

[Andrew Brennan]

This doesnt work for me, I get the error: ps: 0509-048 Flag -o was used with invalid list.

[Dennis Williamson]

@AndrewBrennan: try ps -p PID -o comm,rss

[ivicaa]

+1 for "just remember, by default, nearly all of the numbers are page counts, which are usually 4KB in size"

[Bhaskar Jyoti Dutta]

include the options filtertype=working,segment=off and you will see the real memory usage.