It seems most people don't know how to measure a program's memory usage. Doing a ps and looking at SIZE or RSS totally does not cut it.

Here's how to do it right (in my opinion):

First you need to make sure your system is relatively quiescent, and memory load won't be randomly jumnping around. Now run `top'. Look at the memory and swap free. Record these numbers.

Now run the program you want to check. Keep watching `top', and see what the numbers settle at. Compute the difference. This is the only real way not to be fooled by thinks like shared libraries, buffers, mmap'd I/O, memory shared by multiple kernel threads that show separately in ps, other sorts of shared memory...

Of course, this only measures one prorgram. If shared libraries are getting used a lot, it's best to measure a set of programs meant to be used together all at once, since a lot of memory will be shared between them. This is the major blunder a lot of people make. Measuring one program that uses lots of shared libraries, if you are going to use any of the others, penalizes the program unfairly for being a good code reuse citizen.

life

I think I have gotten infected with the Advogato Malaise that has been going around lately.

tv

Bring out the Iron Chefs!