How to profile shared memory?

Question

I have a program that has a peak memory usage of 66MB that I'm trying to profile with Valgrind Massif. Unfortunately, Massif shows only 800KB of peak memory usage. On the other hand, top tells me that 65MB are shared memory. Is it possible to profile shared memory usage of a program in Linux?

I know about /proc/pid/smap, what would be the difference with /proc/pid/maps? Will it allow me to see the whole 'memory life' of my program? — bruno nery

phd phd · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-22T21:10:34

At least with Valgrind 3.7.0, you have the below option which should give what you need: --pages-as-heap=no|yes profile memory at the page level [no]

How to profile shared memory?

1 Answers