I've got a build server where dmesg is reporting that it is having to kill processes because it is running out of memory. As the system is running many builds and other processes concurrently, I need to figure out which process or processes are really using too much memory. i.e. I'm not convinced the process being killed is the one hogging the memory.
Ideally I'd like to dump the memory usage at the point when the out of memory killer kicks in, with a full command line of each process. Is there a way to do this? Alternatively, if I can't dump it at that specific point, I plan to set up a cron job to dump memory usage every minute or two, but I still need some help to get the correct output.
The output from smem is pretty good, but it truncates the command line:
PID User Command Swap USS PSS RSS
39090 user /usr/bin/Xvfb +extension RA 4732 144 148 264
20837 user -bash 0 780 1100 2144
21144 user python /usr/bin/smem 0 12120 12320 13248
19224 user /opt/atlassian/bamboo_home/ 0 234940 235303 237144
12414 user /usr/java/jdk1.8.0_121/bin/ 176128 2249180 2249338 2250428
Is there a way to tell smem to show the full command line? Alternatively a simple way of piping the output to show me what I need? I can pipe into xargs and ps to get the full command line like this:
smem -H -c "pid" | xargs ps
However then I've lost the memory usage values from smem.
Best Answer
If you have the process name, you might find something like the answer here quite useful: Finding Average size of single Apache process for setting MaxClients
You can replace
httpdat the beginning of that command with your process name and it will show you the total memory usage for processes with that name on the first line and the average memory usage of those processes on the second line. Hope this helps! :)