RSS leak over time

Sample RSS every 5s to confirm a real leak (monotonic growth) vs steady churn

while sleep 5; do ps -o rss= -p <pid> | awk '{print strftime("%T"),$1/1024"MB"}'; done
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troubleshooting32 commands
tags
troubleshootingmemorydebugmonitoring

More troubleshooting commands

  • Fast memory rollup
    cat /proc/<pid>/smaps_rollup

    One-shot Rss/Pss/Swap totals without parsing full smaps; cheap on huge maps

  • Largest memory mappings
    pmap -x <pid> | sort -k3 -rn | head

    Top RSS mappings by region; spot a leaking heap, mmap or shared lib bloat

  • Kernel slab top consumers
    slabtop -o -s c | head -20

    Sort slab caches by size; dentry/inode bloat explains kernel memory pressure

  • Reclaimable slab memory
    grep -E 'Slab|SReclaimable|SUnreclaim' /proc/meminfo

    Split slab into reclaimable vs unreclaimable; high SUnreclaim = real kernel leak

  • OOM killer in dmesg
    dmesg -T | grep -iE 'killed process|out of memory' | tail

    Find OOM victims with human timestamps; -T avoids unreadable kernel ticks

all 32 troubleshooting commands