What is RSS and VSZ in Linux memory management

问题:

What are RSS and VSZ in Linux memory management? In a multithreaded environment how can both of these can be managed and tracked?

回答1:

RSS is the Resident Set Size and is used to show how much memory is allocated to that process and is in RAM. It does not include memory that is swapped out. It does include memory from shared libraries as long as the pages from those libraries are actually in memory. It does include all stack and heap memory.

VSZ is the Virtual Memory Size. It includes all memory that the process can access, including memory that is swapped out, memory that is allocated, but not used, and memory that is from shared libraries.

So if process A has a 500K binary and is linked to 2500K of shared libraries, has 200K of stack/heap allocations of which 100K is actually in memory (rest is swapped or unused), and it has only actually loaded 1000K of the shared libraries and 400K of its own binary then:

RSS: 400K + 1000K + 100K = 1500K
VSZ: 500K + 2500K + 200K = 3200K

Since part of the memory is shared, many processes may use it, so if you add up all of the RSS values you can easily end up with more space than your system has.

The memory that is allocated also may not be in RSS until it is actually used by the program. So if your program allocated a bunch of memory up front, then uses it over time, you could see RSS going up and VSZ staying the same.

There is also PSS (proportional set size). This is a newer measure which tracks the shared memory as a proportion used by the current process. So if there were two processes using the same shared library from before:

PSS: 400K + (1000K/2) + 100K = 400K + 500K + 100K = 1000K

Threads all share the same address space, so the RSS, VSZ and PSS for each thread is identical to all of the other threads in the process. Use ps or top to view this information in linux/unix.

There is way more to it than this, to learn more check the following references:

• http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/en/man1/ps.1.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20120520221529/http://emilics.com/blog/article/mconsumption.html

Also see:

• A way to determine a process's "real" memory usage, i.e. private dirty RSS?

回答2:

RSS is Resident Set Size (physically resident memory - this is currently occupying space in the machine's physical memory), and VSZ is Virtual Memory Size (address space allocated - this has addresses allocated in the process's memory map, but there isn't necessarily any actual memory behind it all right now).

Note that in these days of commonplace virtual machines, physical memory from the machine's view point may not really be actual physical memory.

回答3:

I think much has already been said, about RSS vs VSZ. From an administrator/programmer/user perspective, when I design/code applications I am more concerned about the RSZ, (Resident memory), as and when you keep pulling more and more variables (heaped) you will see this value shooting up. Try a simple program to build malloc based space allocation in loop, and make sure you fill data in that malloc'd space. RSS keeps moving up. As far as VSZ is concerned, it's more of virtual memory mapping that linux does, and one of its core features derived out of conventional operating system concepts. The VSZ management is done by Virtual memory management of the kernel, for more info on VSZ, see Robert Love's description on mm_struct and vm_struct, which are part of basic task_struct data structure in kernel.

回答4:

They are not managed, but measured and possibly limited (see getrlimit system call, also on getrlimit(2)).

RSS means resident set size (the part of your virtual address space sitting in RAM).

You can query the virtual address space of process 1234 using proc(5) with cat /proc/1234/maps and its status (including memory consumption) thru cat /proc/1234/status