Peak memory usage of a linux/unix process

[Edit: Works on Ubuntu 14.04: /usr/bin/time -v command Make sure to use the full path.]

Looks like /usr/bin/time does give you that info, if you pass -v (this is on Ubuntu 8.10). See, e.g., Maximum resident set size below:

$ /usr/bin/time -v ls /....        Command being timed: "ls /"        User time (seconds): 0.00        System time (seconds): 0.01        Percent of CPU this job got: 250%        Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:00.00        Average shared text size (kbytes): 0        Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0        Average stack size (kbytes): 0        Average total size (kbytes): 0        Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 0        Average resident set size (kbytes): 0        Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0        Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 315        Voluntary context switches: 2        Involuntary context switches: 0        Swaps: 0        File system inputs: 0        File system outputs: 0        Socket messages sent: 0        Socket messages received: 0        Signals delivered: 0        Page size (bytes): 4096        Exit status: 0

(This is an already answered, old question.. but just for the record :)

I was inspired by Yang's script, and came up with this small tool, named memusg. I simply increased the sampling rate to 0.1 to handle much short living processes. Instead of monitoring a single process, I made it measure rss sum of the process group. (Yeah, I write lots of separate programs that work together) It currently works on Mac OS X and Linux. The usage had to be similar to that of time:

memusg ls -alR / >/dev/null

It only shows the peak for the moment, but I'm interested in slight extensions for recording other (rough) statistics.

It's good to have such simple tool for just taking a look before we start any serious profiling.

Valgrind one-liner:

valgrind --tool=massif --pages-as-heap=yes --massif-out-file=massif.out ./test.sh; grep mem_heap_B massif.out | sed -e 's/mem_heap_B=\(.*\)/\1/' | sort -g | tail -n 1

Note use of --pages-as-heap to measure all memory in a process. More info here: http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html

This will slow down your command significantly.