peak memory measurement of long running process in linux
linux, memory
Solution
Just use top -n to iterate a specified number of times, and -d to delay between updates. Also you can grab only the output relevant to your process by grepping its pid, like:
top -n 30 -d 60 | grep <process-id>
Read the top manual page for more information
man top
Of course, you can also grab the column you need by using awk.
Problem
How do I monitor the peak memory consumed by a process in Linux? This is not a program I can internally modify to measure peak memory usage. I do not really want detailed measurements, nor do I want them to slow down my program excessively.. so valgrind or anything heavyweight is not what I am looking for... And like other posts earlier [Peak memory usage of a linux/unix process, time -v doesn't seem to report memory for my machine... I can just run top or ps and extract the memory consumed strings for my process id using a simple script. However, my process runs for about 20-30 minutes so I want to be able to log and get the max. I can tolerate coarse grained samples... every 1-minute or so... Specifically how do I-> 1. fork this simple mem-measure script in zsh? 2. kill it when the process-under-test finishes?