On Oct 28, 2008, at 9:49 AM, Francis Dubé wrote:
Here's an example of top's output regarding our httpd process :
54326 apache 1 96 0 156M 13108K select 1 0:00 0.15% httpd 54952 apache 1 96 0 156M 12684K select 1 0:00 0.10% httpd 52343 apache 1 4 0 155M 12280K select 0 0:01 0.10% httpd

Most of our page are in HTML with a LOT of images. Few PHP pages, very light PHP processing.

156M x 450 process = way more RAM than what we have (same for RES). Concretely, how must I interpret these results?

First, your Apache children are huge, at least for FreeBSD. :-) Also, they are mostly paged out, which suggests your system is under significant VM pressure, but the vmstat output would be helpful to confirm.

It's as I expected -- you don't understand the difference between
SIZE (SZ) and RES (RSS).  The simple version:

SIZE == amount of memory that's shared across all processes on the
machine, e.g. shared libraries. It doesn't mean "156MB is being taken
up per process".

SIZE == the amount of VM address space allocated by the process.

It includes things shared (copy-on-write) between many processes like the shared libraries; it also includes memory-mapped files (including .so's like apache modules being loaded into the process), VM allocated but not yet used by malloc()/brk(), the stack, and so forth.

RES == amount of memory that's specifically allocated to that individual
process.  The three httpd processes above are taking up a total of
~38MBytes of memory (13108K + 12684K + 12280K).

RES == the amount of process VM that is resident in actual physical RAM; the rest of the process is paged out to the swapfile or filesystem for memory-mapped files.

As I said, even with RES the numbers dont seems to have any sense.

Let's say 12500K x 450 = ~5500MBytes. Considering there's a lot of process other than Apache running on the server...there's something wrong. Is there something shared in RES too ?

Yep. Quite probably a lot, but the amount of memory which is specific to just that process is not easily found from FreeBSD's top, regrettably.

For the sake of example, and because the same explanation applies pretty closly to FreeBSD, consider an httpd running on a MacOSX system. Here's top output, which includes columns "RPRVT" for "resident memory used by just this process", "RSHRD" which is "resident, shared with other processes", "RSIZE" which is FreeBSD's "RES", and "VSIZE", which is FreeBSD's "SIZE":

Processes: 136 total, 4 running, 132 sleeping... 215 threads 11:06:40 Load Avg: 1.71, 1.66, 1.62 CPU usage: 12.5% user, 59.7% sys, 27.8% idle SharedLibs: num = 141, resident = 18.3M code, 2.92M data, 6.40M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 10360, resident =  101M + 5.91M private,  159M shared
PhysMem: 159M wired, 252M active, 99.0M inactive, 510M used, 1.50G free
VM: 7.16G + 88.8M   1378510(0) pageins, 88743(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE 2868 httpd 0.0% 43:21.28 1 12 92 1.82M 144M 72.9M 169M 2869 httpd 0.0% 46:29.45 1 12 92 1.95M 144M 73.2M 169M 2870 httpd 0.0% 46:55.84 1 12 92 1.89M 144M 73.0M 169M

...and the vmmap command, documented here:

  
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/vmmap.1.html

...provides detailed info about a single process' VM usage:

# vmmap 2870
Virtual Memory Map of process 2870 (httpd)
Output report format:  2.0

==== Non-writable regions for process 2870
__PAGEZERO 00000000-00001000 [ 4K] ---/--- SM=NUL /usr/ sbin/httpd __TEXT 00001000-00050000 [ 316K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /usr/ sbin/httpd __LINKEDIT 0005a000-00065000 [ 44K] r--/rwx SM=COW /usr/ sbin/httpd __TEXT 00065000-00068000 [ 12K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /usr/ libexec/httpd/mod_log_config.so __LINKEDIT 00069000-0006a000 [ 4K] r--/rwx SM=COW /usr/ libexec/httpd/mod_log_config.so __TEXT 0006a000-0006c000 [ 8K] r-x/rwx SM=COW /usr/ libexec/httpd/mod_mime.so __LINKEDIT 0006d000-0006e000 [ 4K] r--/rwx SM=COW /usr/ libexec/httpd/mod_mime.so
[ ... ]
__DATA a1a0e000-a1a20000 [ 72K] r--/r-- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib __DATA a1a20000-a1a23000 [ 12K] r--/r-- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib __DATA a4f2c000-a4f2f000 [ 12K] r--/r-- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libssl.0.9.7.dylib __DATA a7233000-a7235000 [ 8K] r--/r-- SM=NUL / System/Library/Perl/lib/5.8/libperl.dylib system fffec000-fffef000 [ 12K] ---/rwx SM=NUL commpage [libobjc.A.dylib] system fffef000-ffff0000 [ 4K] r-x/rwx SM=COW commpage [libobjc.A.dylib] system ffff8000-ffffa000 [ 8K] r--/r-- SM=SHM commpage [libSystem.B.dylib]

==== Writable regions for process 2870
__DATA 00050000-00059000 [ 36K] rw-/rwx SM=COW /usr/ sbin/httpd __DATA 00059000-0005a000 [ 4K] rw-/rwx SM=COW /usr/ sbin/httpd __DATA 00068000-00069000 [ 4K] rw-/rwx SM=COW /usr/ libexec/httpd/mod_log_config.so __DATA 0006c000-0006d000 [ 4K] rw-/rwx SM=COW /usr/ libexec/httpd/mod_mime.so
[ ... ]
__DATA a0a3a000-a0a4f000 [ 84K] rw-/rw- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libobjc.A.dylib __OBJC a0a4f000-a0a50000 [ 4K] rw-/rw- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libobjc.A.dylib __DATA a0b70000-a0b71000 [ 4K] rw-/rw- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libauto.dylib __DATA a1425000-a1426000 [ 4K] rw-/rw- SM=COW /usr/ lib/libgcc_s.1.dylib __DATA a7229000-a7233000 [ 40K] rw-/rw- SM=COW / System/Library/Perl/lib/5.8/libperl.dylib Stack bf800000-c0000000 [ 8192K] rw-/rwx SM=COW thread 0

==== Legend
SM=sharing mode:
        COW=copy_on_write PRV=private NUL=empty ALI=aliased
        SHM=shared ZER=zero_filled S/A=shared_alias

==== Summary for process 2870
ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=18840KB resident=10976KB(58%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=7864KB(42%) Writable regions: Total=51100KB written=548KB(1%) resident=27276KB(53%) swapped_out=0KB(0%) unallocated=23824KB(47%)

REGION TYPE             [ VIRTUAL]
===========             [ =======]
MALLOC                  [  42400K]
Stack                   [   8192K]
VM_ALLOCATE ?           [    364K]
__DATA                  [   1048K]
__LINKEDIT              [   4352K]
__OBJC                  [      4K]
__PAGEZERO              [      4K]
__TEXT                  [  14488K]
mapped file             [ 120368K]
shared memory           [      4K]
system                  [     24K]

Note that you can obtain somewhat similar information under FreeBSD using the sysutils/pmap port:

PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 40037 www 1 4 0 28820K 11532K accept 1:10 0.00% httpd

# pmap 40037
40037:  /usr/local/sbin/httpd
Address   Kbytes     RSS  Shared    Priv Mode  Mapped File
08048000     280     208     280       - r-x   /usr/local/sbin/httpd
0808E000       8       8       -       8 rw-   /usr/local/sbin/httpd
08090000      16       -       -       - rw-   [swap pager]
08094000     976       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]
08188000    2420       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]
083E5000    6968       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]
2808E000     144      92     144       - r-x   /libexec/ld-elf.so.1
280B2000       8       4       8       - rw-   /libexec/ld-elf.so.1
280B4000      20       -       -       - rw-   [swap pager]
280B9000      32       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]
280C1000      64      16      64       - r-x   /lib/libz.so.3
[ ... ]
2920F000 4 0 4 - r-x /usr/local/lib/php/ 20060613/dom.so 29210000 16 0 16 - rwx /usr/local/lib/php/ 20060613/dom.so
29214000      60       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]
29225000      16       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]

BFBE0000     128       -       -       - rwx   [swap pager]
-------- ------- ------- ------- -------
Total Kb   28740    3996   17384     456

...and the pmap manpage talks about how to understand this:

"     To calculate the amount of memory a group of processes is using:

- for each process of the same binary, count the private memory
               used for n-1 processes.

           -   for each binary, count the total resident size once.

For example, using the pmap data above, we can calculate that 20 bash
     binaries would used

           452Kbytes * 19 + 1416Kbytes = 8588 + 1416 Kbytes
                                       = 8588Kbytes"

Regards,
--
-Chuck

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