Religious war? no thanks.

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Mon, December 6, 2004 7:47, david said:
> So which is the more accurate?

Either, both and neither. Reporting memory usage on Linux is a strange,
hairy and complex thing. The gnome system monitor is probably reporting
memory usage comprising three things: code, data, shared libs.
The shared libs is what takes up the most, so processes can appear to be
huge, where in fact many of them are sharing the same memory.
The best example for ridiculous memory reporting is the X server, which
people constantly accuse of being bloated and insane because it reports as
using hundreds of MB, where it is actually only using a few tens of MB,
but has lots of caches and graphics card memory mapped.

If you run "ps auwx", the RSS column is a fair approximation of the memory
in use (although it won't count swapped out stuff), the VSZ one is that
and all the shared stuff.

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net