On the measurement of thread-level memory usage

Abstract

In the embedded system, the memory profiling of an application is very critical and important to solve the problem. The memory usage is usually measured on the basis of process-level granularity. However, the process-level memory usage gives a lack of information to analyze an application, which consists of big processes with many threads. If a specific thread in the process has memory problems like memory leak or large memory consumption, then this may lead to a malfunction of an application due to the waste of an unnecessary memory by the problematic thread. This paper gives an efficient framework to get a memory usage of a process with thread level granularity and we called it Memory Usage Per Thread (MUPT). This framework would provide memory allocation information in terms of page_fault for a given multi-threaded process with thread granularity and results are expressed using new added proc interface. Thus, MUPT provides a mechanism to debug or monitor the thread memory usage and guide an application user to detect memory leak or large amount of incorrect memory allocation.