ps_mem

A utility to accurately report the core memory usage for a program

Yes the name is a bit weird. coremem would be more appropriate, but for backwards compatible reasons the ps_mem name remains.

Install:

pip install ps_mem is supported, or rpm and deb packages are available for most distros. Also the ps_mem.py script can be run directly.

Usage:

ps_mem [-h|--help] [-p PID,...] [-s|--split-args] [-t|--total] [-w N]
       [-d|--discriminate-by-pid] [-S|--swap]

Example output:

 Private  +   Shared  =  RAM used       Program

 34.6 MiB +   1.0 MiB =  35.7 MiB       gnome-terminal
139.8 MiB +   2.3 MiB = 142.1 MiB       firefox
291.8 MiB +   2.5 MiB = 294.3 MiB       gnome-shell
272.2 MiB +  43.9 MiB = 316.1 MiB       chrome (12)
913.9 MiB +   3.2 MiB = 917.1 MiB       thunderbird
---------------------------------
                          1.9 GiB
=================================

The [-p PID,...] option allows filtering the results. For example to restrict output to the current $USER you could:

sudo ps_mem -p $(pgrep -d, -u $USER)

or to summarize the total RAM usage per user you could:

for i in $(ps -e -o user= | sort | uniq); do
  printf '%-20s%10s\n' $i $(sudo ps_mem --total -p $(pgrep -d, -u $i))
done