I should have clarified, I didn't mean that using top or ps were useless, just that they weren't as accurate as other measures. It will still give you an indiciation of whether or not a process is out of control, as an increasing RSS shows that the kernel is having to compensate for a growing process for whatever reason.
If you were to plot the memory usage of all the processes on your system, using RSS as the x-value and writeable/private as the y-value it wouldn't be a linear graph. That's why I was recommending the other methods, but for basic indications of growth top should be fine. It's just annoying when people see a top/ps output of gedit and say "My text editor is taking up half my memory!!!!!!"
If you were to plot the memory usage of all the processes on your system, using RSS as the x-value and writeable/private as the y-value it wouldn't be a linear graph. That's why I was recommending the other methods, but for basic indications of growth top should be fine. It's just annoying when people see a top/ps output of gedit and say "My text editor is taking up half my memory!!!!!!"
Thanks
I didn't want want to start a brush war either
I just need a tool that gives me some idea of what is going on with my memory, so I know where to start fixing...
Top and xosview are not exact; but they seem to show the difference between SL using 230 MB RES (whatever that REALLY means) and 880 MB RES quite clearly.
And as the man said, "a workable lie is more useable than an unworkable truth" ...
Close enough, in other words; and the breakdown xosview gives into process/buffer/cache is ALSO not accurate, nor is the contents of /proc; but they do give me a picture of what is going on, so I can start analysis.
Which is basically all I want. If I was developing an application, though, or debugging it for funny APPARENT memory usage, these displays would not be sufficient. So I thank you for pointing that out