
How to Measure the Working Set Size on Linux - ingve
http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2018-01-17/measure-working-set-size.html
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zokier
Kinda sidenote, but I find it funny how an simple innocent question like "how
much memory does app x use" has no easy answers. This is further complicated
when the application in question runs in multiple processes

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eikenberry
The article mainly presents the tools the author uses to measure WSS and while
I can see a few possibilities I'm curious if anyone can give some more
examples of where measuring WSS would be useful?

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brendangregg
Ah, I should have mentioned why I was doing this: it's part of Linux KPTI
patch analysis (Meltdown) that I've been doing, as the WSS is one factor in
the performance loss experienced (due to TLB flushing).

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ashayh
There is also ps_mem.py:
[https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem](https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem)

"A utility to accurately report the core memory usage for a program."

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brendangregg
That's not measuring working set size. It's showing usage in terms resident
memory, as you see in many tools (by process, not by program). But you don't
know how much of that memory is active or is cold. That's what WSS measures:
active memory.

