How to measure memory consumption of a program on Linux

The Linux operating system provide detailed information about memory processes use. You can use the ps or the top tools; or you canread information written on the /proc filesystem.

There you can find detailed information for every jobs running on your machine. You can get a list of the running jobs with:

ps -A

and then look, for example, into the file /proc/5995/status, where 5995 is the Job ID:

cat /proc/5995/status

        VmSize:     7660 kB
        VmLck:         0 kB
        VmRSS:      5408 kB
        VmData:     4204 kB
        VmStk:        20 kB
        VmExe:       576 kB
        VmLib:      2032 kB