pagemon: an ncurses based tool to monitor process memory

While developing stress-ng I wanted to be able to see if the various memory stressors were touching memory in the way I had anticipated.  While digging around in the Linux documentation I discovered the very useful soft/dirty bit on Page Table Entries (PTEs) that get set when a page is written to.  The mechanism to check for the soft/dirty bit is described in Documentation/vm/soft-dirty.txt; one needs to:

1. Clear the soft-dirty bits on the PTEs on a chosen process by writing "4" to /proc/$PID/clear_refs
2. Wait a while for some page activity to occur
3. Read the soft-dirty bits on the PTEs to see which pages got written to.

Not too tricky, so how about using this neat feature? While on rather long and dull flight over the Atlantic back in August I hacked up a very crude ncurses based tool to continually check the PTEs of a given process and display the soft/dirty activity in real time.  During this Christmas break I picked this code up and re-worked into a more polished tool.  One can scroll up/down the memory maps and also select a page and view the contents changing in real time.  The tool identifies the type of memory mapping a page belongs to, so one can easily scan through memory looking at pages of memory belonging data, code, heap, stack, anonymous mappings or even swapped out pages.

Running it on X, compiz, firefox or thunderbird is quite instructive as one can see a lot of page activity on the large heap allocations.  The ability to see pages getting swapped out when memory pressure is high is also rather useful.

Page view of Xorg

Memory view of stack

The code is still early development quality (so expect some buglets!) and I need to work on optimising it in a lot of places, but for now, it works well enough to be a fairly interesting tool. I've currently got a package built for Ubuntu Xenial in ppa:colin-king/pagemon and the source can be cloned from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/git/cking/pagemon.git/

So, to install on Xenial, currently one needs to do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:colin-king/pagemon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pagemon

I may be adding a few more features in the next few weeks, and then getting the tool into Ubuntu and Debian.

and as an example, running it on Xorg, it is invoked as:

sudo pagemon -p $(pidof Xorg)

Unfortunately sudo is required to allow one to dig so intrusively into a running process. For more details on how to use pagemon consult the pagemon man page, or press "h" or "?" while running pagemon.