Subject: RSS in ps ..

From: matthew green <[email-masked]>

(hmm, shouldn't netbsd.org really net netbsd.int ?)

misc details: sparc elc, 12 meg ram, 1.0_beta (week or so old).

ok, the RSS column is ps is pretty meaningless these days.. and the
man page doesn't *really* say what it's for.

-- 
     rss     the real memory (resident set) size of the process (in 1024 byte
             units).
-- 

sample ps output gives:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TT  STAT STARTED       TIME COMMAND
mrg       3174  0.0  0.0   680 3812 p7  Is   Sat03PM    0:01.69 -bin/tcsh
mrg       3175  0.0  0.0   716 17244 p8  Is   Sat03PM    0:09.47 -bin/tcsh

i really have no idea what that '17244' is.  i only have 12 meg
of ram in my elc, so it can't be the size in memory.  that binary
is not a shared binary.. if i add up the RSS columns of all the
/bin/tcsh's binaries, it comes to around 140 meg - with 12 meg
ram and 56 meg swap, that doesn't add up.

does anyone know what the rss actually *means* ?  (no, i haven't
grovelled the kernel yet ..)

also, you might hav noticed that with a > 4 digit rss, the ps
output looks ugly.  i'd call this a (mostly insignificant) bug.

.mrg.