How to get memory usage at run time in c++?

Question

Hello,

i need to get the mem usage VIRT and RES at run time of my program and display them.

What i tried so far:

getrusage (http://linux.die.net/man/2/getrusage)

int who = RUSAGE_SELF; 
struct rusage usage; 
int ret; 

ret=getrusage(who,&usage);

cout<<usage.ru_maxrss;

but i always get 0.

Answer 1

Old:

maxrss states the maximum available memory for the process. 0 means that no limit is put upon the process. What you probably want is unshared data usage ru_idrss.

New: It seems that the above does not actually work, as the kernel does not fill most of the values. What does work is to get the information from proc. Instead of parsing it oneself though, it is easier to use libproc (part of procps) as follows:

// getrusage.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <proc/readproc.h>

int main() {
  struct proc_t usage;
  look_up_our_self(&usage);
  printf("usage: %lu\n", usage.vsize);
}

Compile with "gcc -o getrusage getrusage.c -lproc"

Answer 2

in additional to your way
you could call system ps command and get memory usage from it output.
or read info from /proc/pid ( see PIOCPSINFO struct )

Answer 3

On linux, if you can afford the run time cost (for debugging), you can use valgrind with the massif tool:

http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html

It is heavy weight, but very useful.

Answer 4

On Linux, I've never found an ioctl() solution. For our applications, we coded a general utility routine based on reading files in /proc/pid. There are a number of these files which give differing results. Here's the one we settled on (the question was tagged C++, and we handled I/O using C++ constructs, but it should be easily adaptable to C i/o routines if you need to):

#include <unistd.h>
#include <ios>
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// process_mem_usage(double &, double &) - takes two doubles by reference,
// attempts to read the system-dependent data for a process' virtual memory
// size and resident set size, and return the results in KB.
//
// On failure, returns 0.0, 0.0

void process_mem_usage(double& vm_usage, double& resident_set)
{
   using std::ios_base;
   using std::ifstream;
   using std::string;

   vm_usage     = 0.0;
   resident_set = 0.0;

   // 'file' stat seems to give the most reliable results
   //
   ifstream stat_stream("/proc/self/stat",ios_base::in);

   // dummy vars for leading entries in stat that we don't care about
   //
   string pid, comm, state, ppid, pgrp, session, tty_nr;
   string tpgid, flags, minflt, cminflt, majflt, cmajflt;
   string utime, stime, cutime, cstime, priority, nice;
   string O, itrealvalue, starttime;

   // the two fields we want
   //
   unsigned long vsize;
   long rss;

   stat_stream >> pid >> comm >> state >> ppid >> pgrp >> session >> tty_nr
               >> tpgid >> flags >> minflt >> cminflt >> majflt >> cmajflt
               >> utime >> stime >> cutime >> cstime >> priority >> nice
               >> O >> itrealvalue >> starttime >> vsize >> rss; // don't care about the rest

   long page_size_kb = sysconf(_SC_PAGE_SIZE) / 1024; // in case x86-64 is configured to use 2MB pages
   vm_usage     = vsize / 1024.0;
   resident_set = rss * page_size_kb;
}

int main()
{
   using std::cout;
   using std::endl;

   double vm, rss;
   process_mem_usage(vm, rss);
   cout << "VM: " << vm << "; RSS: " << rss << endl;
}

Answer 5

I am using other way to do that and it sounds realistic. What I do is i got the PID of the process by getpid() function and then I use /proc/pid/stat file. I believe the 23rd column of the stat file is the vmsize (look at the Don post). You may read the vmsize from the file wherever you need in the code. In case you wonder how much a snippet of a code may use memory, you may read that file once before that snippet and once after and you can subtract them from each other.

Answer 6

The existing answers are better for how to get the correct value, but I can at least explain why getrusage isn't working for you.

man 2 getrusage:

The above struct [rusage] was taken from BSD 4.3 Reno. Not all fields are meaningful under Linux. Right now (Linux 2.4, 2.6) only the fields ru_utime, ru_stime, ru_minflt, ru_majflt, and ru_nswap are maintained.