A way to determine a process's “real” memory usage, i.e. private dirty RSS?

Question

Tools like \'ps\' and \'top\' report various kinds of memory usages, such as the VM size and the Resident Set Size. However, none of those are the \"real\" memory usage:

Answer 1

Check it out, this is the source code of gnome-system-monitor, it thinks the memory "really used" by one process is sum(info->mem) of X Server Memory(info->memxserver) and Writable Memory(info->memwritable), the "Writable Memory" is the memory blocks which are marked as "Private_Dirty" in /proc/PID/smaps file.

Other than linux system, could be different way according to gnome-system-monitor code.

static void
get_process_memory_writable (ProcInfo *info)
{
    glibtop_proc_map buf;
    glibtop_map_entry *maps;

    maps = glibtop_get_proc_map(&buf, info->pid);

    gulong memwritable = 0;
    const unsigned number = buf.number;

    for (unsigned i = 0; i < number; ++i) {
#ifdef __linux__
        memwritable += maps[i].private_dirty;
#else
        if (maps[i].perm & GLIBTOP_MAP_PERM_WRITE)
            memwritable += maps[i].size;
#endif
    }

    info->memwritable = memwritable;

    g_free(maps);
}

static void
get_process_memory_info (ProcInfo *info)
{
    glibtop_proc_mem procmem;
    WnckResourceUsage xresources;

    wnck_pid_read_resource_usage (gdk_screen_get_display (gdk_screen_get_default ()),
                                  info->pid,
                                  &xresources);

    glibtop_get_proc_mem(&procmem, info->pid);

    info->vmsize    = procmem.vsize;
    info->memres    = procmem.resident;
    info->memshared = procmem.share;

    info->memxserver = xresources.total_bytes_estimate;

    get_process_memory_writable(info);

    // fake the smart memory column if writable is not available
    info->mem = info->memxserver + (info->memwritable ? info->memwritable : info->memres);
}