Memory usage by group of processes

While monitoring a http/php server, I needed to do some statistics about php-cgi memory usage.

Playing with memory_limit in PHP, we wanted to know the average memory usage per php-cgi process. This is easily calculated with our best friend awk.

First, get the number of php running processes:

# ps aux | grep php-cgi | grep -v grep | wc -l
126

Then, use awk to calculate the average memory usage for these processes:

# ps aux | grep --exclude=grep php-cgi | grep -v grep | awk 'BEGIN{s=0;}{s=s+$6;}END{print s/126;}'
33987.8

The number used in the calculation is the field RSS given by ps. The ps manual page says:

rss: resident set size, the non-swapped physical memory that a task has used (in kiloBytes)

You can also calculate the total memory used by all php-cgi processes:

# ps aux | grep --exclude=grep php-cgi | grep -v grep | awk 'BEGIN{s=0;}{s=s+$6;}END{print s;}'
4302028

If you need to watch the trend of this average memory usage, a little shell loop does the trick:

# while [ 1 ]; do ps aux | grep --exclude=grep php-cgi | grep -v grep | awk 'BEGIN{s=0;}{s=s+$6;}END{print s/126;}'; sleep 2; done
34401.3
34405.1
34408.4
34409.4
34414.2
34417

This entry was written by CharlyBr, posted on March 13, 2009 at 4:14 pm, filed under Benchmarks, Command line, Monitoring and tagged , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

How to know the maximum RAM supported by your server?

The dmidecode command gives you all informations available about your memory.

With the special parameter “-t 16″, you can see the maximum (physical) memory that your server can have:

$ dmidecode -t 16
# dmidecode 2.8
SMBIOS 2.4 present.

Handle 0x1000, DMI type 16, 15 bytes
Physical Memory Array
Location: System Board Or Motherboard
Use: System Memory
Error Correction Type: Multi-bit ECC
Maximum Capacity: 32 GB
Error Information Handle: Not Provided
Number Of Devices: 8

Here we can see that your server can handle up to 32Gb

Check empty memory slots

To know which slots are used or not use the “-t 17″ flag.

dmidecode -t 17 | grep Size
        Size: 2048 MB
        Size: 2048 MB
        Size: No Module Installed
        Size: No Module Installed
        Size: No Module Installed
        Size: No Module Installed
        Size: No Module Installed
        Size: No Module Installed

Links

This entry was written by CharlyBr, posted on August 4, 2008 at 8:42 am, filed under Uncategorized and tagged , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.