[Chimera-users] memory usage

[Greg Couch]

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, jean-francois menetret wrote:

> It seems that Chimera is not releasing memory easily on our linux PC.
> Is this a know problem for Chimera ?

That is normal UNIX behavior.  Once virtual memory is assigned to a 
process, it isn't unassigned (released) until the process dies. 
Internally, chimera is releasing the memory, so it's not leaking memory on 
Linux anymore than any other platform (there might be no leaks, but I 
can't say for sure).  To get a better of idea of chimera's memory use, you 
should check the RSS (Resident Set Size) instead of the SZ (swap size) or 
VSZ (virtual memory size).  The RSS number lags the actual amoumt of 
memory that chimera is using because the system won't page out memory 
unless another process needs it, but it is much closer to chimera's actual 
memory use.

So if you run:

 		ps -o pid,rss,sz,vsz,user,args

You'll see that the RSS value is smaller than the SZ value which is 
smaller than the VSZ value.  If the process didn't use any shared 
libraries then the SZ and VSZ values would be the same.

 	Hope this helps,

 	Greg Couch
 	UCSF Computer Graphics LabA