From:	Dave Tang	Date:	Mon Feb  8 12:59:41 2010
Subject:	Re: Perl script to monitor memory usage on unix box

On Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:52:37 +1000, Shawn H Corey <shawnhcorey@gmail.com>  
wrote:

> Dave Tang wrote:
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>> I want to write a script that checks memory usage of my RHEL box, and
>> ran as a cron job say every 10 minutes.
>>
>> I could write the Perl script to run a system command like "ps aux",
>> parse that information and kill a job if >90% of the total system memory
>> (and I realise most of the times memory is sitting in cached) is being
>> used. And I guess if 8 jobs are already using 80%, the job that topples
>> the threshold will have to be stopped. But since that isn't a Perl
>> question, I won't ask if that is a good implementation.
>>
>> Since I didn't want to reinvent the wheel and/or write an inelegant
>> script, I wanted to ask if there are CPAN modules, which people have
>> used, to help with achieving my task?
>
> I don't know if there's any CPAN modules, but you should use the /proc
> directory rather than ps.
>
>

Thanks for the reply Shawn. There was a reason for using ps (don't know if  
it is a good reason though).

Very recently a user wrote a script that crashed the server, by using all  
the memory. So also I wanted to capture the process information too. Is  
this information available in the /proc directory?

Cheers,

Dave