psm - simple, accurate memory reporting for Linux

psm makes it easy to see who is resident in memory, and who is significantly swapped out.

psm is based off the ideas and implementation of ps_mem.py. It requires root privileges to run. It is implemented in go, and since the executable is a binary it can be made setuid root so that unprivileged users can get a quick overview of the current memory situation.

installation

If you're familiar with go and have the go toolchain installed, installation is as easy as:

go get github.com/bpowers/psm
sudo `which psm`

The sudo `which psm` can get a bit tiring. If you're on Ubuntu, there is a PPA which install psm as setuid root:

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties # for apt-add-repository
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bobbypowers/psm
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install psm

example output

bpowers@python-worker-01:~$ psm -filter=celery
    MB RAM    SHARED   SWAPPED	PROCESS (COUNT)
      60.6       1.1     134.2	[celeryd@notifications:MainProcess] (1)
      62.6       1.1          	[celeryd@health:MainProcess] (1)
     113.7       1.2          	[celeryd@uploads:MainProcess] (1)
     155.1       1.1          	[celeryd@triggers:MainProcess] (1)
     176.7       1.2          	[celeryd@updates:MainProcess] (1)
     502.9       1.2          	[celeryd@lookbacks:MainProcess] (1)
     623.8       1.2      28.5	[celeryd@stats:MainProcess] (1)
     671.3       1.2          	[celeryd@default:MainProcess] (1)
#   2366.7               164.7	TOTAL USED BY PROCESSES

The MB RAM column is the sum of the Pss value of each mapping in /proc/$PID/smaps for each process.

TODO

• port to the BSDs and OS X
• FreeBSD has a Linux-compatable procfs impelmentation, which would be trivial to use (and, indeed, ps_mem.py uses it).
• OS X looks... fun. MacFUSE provides a lot of the info we need, but I don't want to depend on having that installed and manually having their procfs mounted. There are Mach functions we could use, but I'm having trouble figuring out how to correctly pass data between go and C. Specifically: https://gist.github.com/4463209 - 'patches welcome'.
• ps_mem.py records the md5sum of each process's smaps entry to make sure that we're not double-counting. Its probably worth doing.

license

psm is offered under the MIT license, see LICENSE for details.