measuring maximum memory usage of a process

[stazz]

Hi all,

I need an automated way to measure (within a reasonable ballpark) the maximum memory usage of programs during thousands of performance-measurement runs. I don't care if I'm measuring pages, bytes, shared, private, etc, so long as I know what I'm measuring.

I can't impact run time too much, so valgrind is not an option. I'm also not in favor of any solution that needs to poll ps or proc all the time. I've been searching around, but can't seem to find anything appropriate for my needs. I've tried the %M output format option for time (very appealing since all these runs are timed anyway), but it seems to always give 0.

Any suggestions?

[theotherjoe]

Have a look at /proc/PID/{stat|statm|status} and
the format description of those files in the kernel documentation
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt