[olug] Monitoring Memory Usage

[Travis Owens]

Hey all...

Got a technical question here... I've done a bunch of googling on
this, and have tested several different ways of doing this, but I'm
getting wildly differing results, so I figured to see if anyone has
any ideas....

I'm using standard shell utilities and scripts to monitor the memory
usage of a specific process and report it via Big Brother.

For this particular process I'm interested in, it's a java process. (I
am just the admin here, I am not the developer, so I don't have access
to the code, nor do I know any specifics they implemented for VM
allocation.)

The process is running on a 2.4.X series machine, so no
/proc/<pid>/smaps definitions...
It's also using jdk1.5.0_07

Here's the various ways I've played with so far:

ps -elfwww | grep <name>
ps  aux | grep <name>
ps  avx | grep <name>
top -p <pid> -b -n 1
pmap -d <pid>

Just trying to get a handle on the most accurate way to define a
specific process's memory footprint. What is in Physical RAM,
buffers/cache, swap, an independent pagefile?

Anyone?

TIA!

-- 
Travis Owens

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall
pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge and more.   -- John F. Kennedy, inaugural speech,
January 20, 1961