smem is a tool that can give numerous reports on memory usage on Linux systems. Unlike existing tools, smem can report proportional set size (PSS), which is a more meaningful representation of the amount of memory used by libraries and applications in a virtual memory system.
Because large portions of physical memory are typically shared among multiple applications, the standard measure of memory usage known as resident set size (RSS) will significantly overestimate memory usage. PSS instead measures each application's "fair share" of each shared area to give a realistic measure.
smem has many features:
system overview listing
listings by process, mapping, user
filtering by process, mapping, or user
configurable columns from multiple data sources
configurable output units and percentages
configurable headers and totals
reading live data from /proc
reading data snapshots from directory mirrors or compressed tarballs
built-in chart generation
smem has a few requirements:
a reasonably modern kernel (> 2.6.27 or so)
a reasonably recent version of Python (2.4 or so)
the matplotlib library for chart generation
smem：http://www.selenic.com/smem/
