Gmemusage LG #25

#### "Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"

## Gmemusage: A Distinctive Memory Monitor

#### By Larry Ayers

### Introduction

Linux may not have many office-suites available, but it sure does have a wide variety of system, process, and memory monitors! I use ProcMeter quite a bit, mainly for the incoming and outgoing TCPIP packet display, but recently I happened upon an unusual memory monitor which displays the relative proportions of memory in use by running processes. Gmemusage is a small X application written by Raju Mathur. He has been attempting to emulate a monitor (also called gmemusage) which is used on Silicon Graphics workstations.

### Features

Here is a screenshot, which will save me several paragraphs of description:

As with many other such monitors, the information shown is essentially the same as what is shown in the memory fields produced by `ps -aux`, which derives its information from pseudo-files in the /proc directory. These files, such as meminfo and loadavg, are generated dynamically by the kernel. You can read them directly, by running a command such as `cat /proc/meminfo`.

Although a plethora of information is presented by the output of `ps -aux` or `top`, more detail is shown than is needed for a quick overview and comparison, and tabular data doesn't easily lend itself to comparative analysis. You won't see precise differences between memory usage while contemplating a gmemusage display, but the proportions are shown in a graphical and easily interpreted format. In most cases the relative proportions are more useful than the decimally exact detail shown by `ps` or `top`.

Raju Mathur has plans to enhance gmemusage. One possibility (mentioned in his TODO file) is to add a pop-up window which would give additional information about a process when its name in the main display is selected with the mouse.

I like this small utility, partly because it diverges from the usual dynamic bar-chart display found in many memory monitors, and also because it is small and specialized. You don't have to spend time configuring it either; it works well "out of the box". If you would like to try it, the source archive is available at the gmemusage home WWW site. Last modified: Sat 31 Jan 1998

##### Copyright © 1998, Larry Ayers
Published in Issue 25 of Linux Gazette, February 1998