[Sussex] RE: Mem usage

[Steve Dobson]

Dom

On 27 January 2003 at 15:42 Dominic Clay wrote: 
> I have (thankfully) found employment once again!!!  
<snip>

Congrats

> On a more techy note:  The 'top' list is definitely showing 
> more than 100% mem usage if you add all the processes together
> (and that is just this particular process name, there are many
> others too!).
> 
> Something must be leaky about this process!

There is a funny thing about Linux, like all Unixes, a process can be
multi-threaded.  The kernel schedules threads.  Nothing strange there.

Now because of Linus's view of the threading structure on other OSs
(see the Linux Kernel archives) ps will list each thread not a process
(if you check you should see the same pid on two entries).

"ps" reports on the memory usage which is stored in the proc_t structure
and the different threads of a process all reference the same proc_t
and thus you'll see some memory entries twice.

Steve