pmon

A process monitor for linux that shows detailed RAM usage info.

$ pmon 261071
vms       rss       pss       uss       shared    swap      rss (%)   pss (%)   uss (%)   cpu (%)
2.576G    1.122G    1.110G    1.107G    99.699M   0B        7.22      7.14      7.12      0.00
2.576G    1.122G    1.110G    1.107G    99.699M   0B        7.22      7.14      7.12      12.23
2.576G    1.122G    1.110G    1.107G    99.699M   0B        7.22      7.14      7.12      6.48

Rationale

Measuring RAM usage on Linux can be tricky. Probably the most correct way to measure it is to use USS, i.e:

USS (Unique Set Size) is the memory which is unique to a process and which would be freed if the process was terminated right now.

Unfortunately, tools like top and htop do not report this metric. Nevertheless, psutil does collect it, so, we use it as the backend to monitor RAM usage.

Install

pipx install pmon

Usage

If you only care about USS then you can use:

$ pmon --ram short 261071
uss       uss (%)   cpu (%)
1.107G    7.12      0.00
1.107G    7.12      0.00
1.107G    7.12      0.00

If you want the full output use:

$ pmon --ram verbose 261071
vms       rss       pss       uss       shared    text      lib       data      dirty     swap      rss (%)   pss (%)   uss (%)   cpu (%)
2.576G    1.122G    1.110G    1.107G    99.699M   4.000K    0B        1.566G    0B        0B        7.22      7.14      7.12      0.00
2.576G    1.122G    1.110G    1.107G    99.699M   4.000K    0B        1.566G    0B        0B        7.22      7.14      7.12      0.00

There are other options which you can explore with:

pmon --help