[ How to log the memory consumption on Linux? ]
Is there any ready-to-use solution to log the memory consumption from the start of the system? I'd like to log the data to simple text file or some database so I can analyze it later.
I'm working on Linux 2.4-based embedded system. I need to debug the problem related to memory consumption. My application automatically start on every system start. I need the way to get the data with timestamps from regular intervals (as often as possible), so I can track down problem.
The symptoms of my problem: when system starts it launched my main application and GUI to visualize the main parameters of the system. GUI based on GTK+ (X server). If I disable GUI and X server then my application works OK. If I enable GUI and X server it does not work when I have 256 MiB or 512 MiB of physical memory installed on the motherboard. If I have 1 GiB of memory installed then everything is OK.
Answer 1
A small script like
rm memory.log
while true; do free >> memory.log; sleep 1; done
Answer 2
The following script prints time stamps and a header.
#!/bin/bash -e
echo " date time $(free -m | grep total | sed -E 's/^ (.*)/\1/g')"
while true; do
echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') $(free -m | grep Mem: | sed 's/Mem://g')"
sleep 1
done
The output looks like this (tested on Ubuntu 15.04, 64-bit).
date time total used free shared buffers cached
2015-08-01 13:57:27 24002 13283 10718 522 693 2308
2015-08-01 13:57:28 24002 13321 10680 522 693 2308
2015-08-01 13:57:29 24002 13355 10646 522 693 2308
2015-08-01 13:57:30 24002 13353 10648 522 693 2308
Answer 3
I think adding a crontab entry will be enough
*/5 * * * * free -m >> some_output_file
There are other tools like SeaLion, New Relic, Server Density etc which will almost do the same but are much easier to install and configure. My favorite is SeaLion, as it being free and also it gives a awesome timeline view of raw outputs of common linux commands.
Answer 4
There's a program called
sar
on *nix systems. You could try to use that to monitor memory usage. It takes measurements at regular intervals. Do a
man sar
for more details. I think the option is -r for taking memory measurements, -i to specify the interval you'd like.
Answer 5
You could put something like
vmstat X >> mylogfile
into a startup script. Since your application is already in startup you could just add this line to the end of the initialization script your application is already using. (where X is # of seconds between log messages)
