mjhjmtu

Since google chrome/chromium spawn multiple processes it's harder to see how much total memory these processes use in total.

Is there an easy way to see how much total memory a series of connected processes is using?

Given that google killed chrome://memory in March 2016, I am now using smem:

# detailed output, in kB apparently
smem -t -P chrom
# just the total PSS, with automatic unit:
smem -t -k -c pss -P chrom | tail -n 1

• to be more accurate replace chrom by full path e.g. /opt/google/chrome or /usr/lib64/chromium-browser
  


• this works the same for multiprocess firefox (e10s) with -P firefox
  


• be careful, smem reports itself in the output, an additional ~10-20M on my system.


• unlike top it needs root access to accurately monitor root processes -- use sudo smem for that.


• see this SO answer for more details on why smem is a good tool and how to read the output.

Running this:

perl -e '$a="x"x1000000000;sleep(10);print"donen"'

takes up 1.8GB RAM. So you would expect running this:

perl -e '$a="x"x1000000000;fork;fork;fork;fork;sleep(10);print"donen"'

would take up 16 times as much. But it does not.

This is due to the Linux kernel's intelligent copy-on-write: Because the contents of '$a' does not change, then the memory of '$a' can be shared. But it will only remain shared until '$a' is changed. When that happens, the changed section will be copied and start to take up RAM.

Whether you can measure how much memory is copy-on-write over-committed I do not know. But at least this explains your over-counting.

I'm sure that it's not the best solution, still it works for me:

#!/bin/sh
ps aux | grep "[/]opt/google/chrome/chrome" | awk 'print $5' | awk 'sum += $1 END print sum ' 
ps aux | grep "[/]opt/google/chrome/chrome" | awk 'print $6' | awk 'sum += $1 END print sum ' 

Note: change the [/]opt/google/chrome/chrome to something appropriate for your system, e.g. if you're on Mac OS X (simply grep "chrome" will work).

I knew that chrome/chromium had a task manager, but it doesn't give the total memory used. It turns out that the "Stats for nerds" link in the task manager leads to chrome://memory-redirect/ which does list the total memory used. It would be nice to have external validation of these numbers, as well as a way to get the information on the command line so more could be done with it, but this seems to be the best way available.

Just quickly calculate the sum of the processes.

On Mac:

• go to chrome://system/ and select all reported in mem_usage
  


• paste in SublimeText
  


• SelectAll (CMD+'A') and SelectAllLines (CMD+SHIFT+'L')


• CMD+Right (go to eol), Backspace, Backspace, Backspace, ALT+Left, CMD+Backspace


• Backspace, type '+', CMD+'A', CMD+'C'


• open Terminal, run python, CMD+V, Enter

Et voila! "Easy"... 🤓😅

PS - Shortcut ninjas & 80s/90s Fighting-game players should have no problem with this solution 🤖🕹💾