Get chrome's total memory usage

Question

Since google chrome/chromium spawn multiple processes it's harder to see how much total memory these processes use in total.

Is there an easy way to see how much total memory a series of connected processes is using?

Answer 1

Given that google killed chrome://memory in March 2016, I am now using smem:

# detailed output, in kB apparently
smem -t -P chrom
# just the total PSS, with automatic unit:
smem -t -k -c pss -P chrom | tail -n 1

• to be more accurate replace chrom by full path e.g. /opt/google/chrome or /usr/lib64/chromium-browser
• this works the same for multiprocess firefox (e10s) with -P firefox
• be careful, smem reports itself in the output, an additional ~10-20M on my system.
• unlike top it needs root access to accurately monitor root processes -- use sudo smem for that.
• see this SO answer for more details on why smem is a good tool and how to read the output.

Answer 2

Improving solution of @eddygeek:

smem -ktP chrome

Take a look on the value of column "USS", on last line

Note: you can also create an alias for this:

alias mem='smem -ktP '

And then use:

mem chrome

Answer 3

I'm sure that it's not the best solution, still it works for me:

#!/bin/sh
ps aux | grep "[/]opt/google/chrome/chrome" | awk '{print $5}' | awk '{sum += $1 } END { print sum }' 
ps aux | grep "[/]opt/google/chrome/chrome" | awk '{print $6}' | awk '{sum += $1 } END { print sum }' 

Note: change the [/]opt/google/chrome/chrome to something appropriate for your system, e.g. if you're on Mac OS X (simply grep "chrome" will work).

Answer 4

Running this:

perl -e '$a="x"x1000000000;sleep(10);print"done\n"'

takes up 1.8GB RAM. So you would expect running this:

perl -e '$a="x"x1000000000;fork;fork;fork;fork;sleep(10);print"done\n"'

would take up 16 times as much. But it does not.

This is due to the Linux kernel's intelligent copy-on-write: Because the contents of '$a' does not change, then the memory of '$a' can be shared. But it will only remain shared until '$a' is changed. When that happens, the changed section will be copied and start to take up RAM.

Whether you can measure how much memory is copy-on-write over-committed I do not know. But at least this explains your over-counting.

Answer 5

Just quickly calculate the sum of the processes.

On Mac:

• go to chrome://system/ and select all reported in mem_usage
• paste in SublimeText
• SelectAll (CMD+'A') and SelectAllLines (CMD+SHIFT+'L')
• CMD+Right (go to eol), Backspace, Backspace, Backspace, ALT+Left, CMD+Backspace
• Backspace, type '+', CMD+'A', CMD+'C'
• open Terminal, run python, CMD+V, Enter

Et voila! "Easy"... 🤓😅

PS - Shortcut ninjas & 80s/90s Fighting-game players should have no problem with this solution 🤖🕹💾

Answer 6

I found a solution with vim and awk. Open chrome://system, expand mem_usage, copy to vim and execute the regexp:

:%s/\D*\(\d*\).MB.*/\1

This leaves only the numbers before MB. Save the file and execute

cat file | awk '{sum += $1} END {print sum}'

I could not convert the vim regexp code to sed.

Answer 7

There is USS which is available cross platforms

The USS (Unique Set Size) is the memory which is unique to a process and which would be freed if the process was terminated right now.

psutil>4.0 Python library can access it

Here is I would use it

sudo python3 -c "import psutil;print(sum(p.memory_full_info().uss for p in psutil.Process(pid=292).children())/1024/1024);"

where pid=292 is PID of most outer process from Activity Monitor

Answer 8

I knew that chrome/chromium had a task manager, but it doesn't give the total memory used. It turns out that the "Stats for nerds" link in the task manager leads to chrome://memory-redirect/ which does list the total memory used. It would be nice to have external validation of these numbers, as well as a way to get the information on the command line so more could be done with it, but this seems to be the best way available.