On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Gennady Bystritsky<Gennady.Bystritsky / quest.com> wrote: > What would be a good way to determine the current heap size (VSZ) for a process on Linux? > > I always used sbrk(0) for that, which used to return the top of the heap.owever recently, to my dismay, I discovered that it does not work on Linux -- I successfully malloc()-ed 1GB, could confirm it with "ps -o pid,vsz,args", and yet sbrk(0) always returns the same value as right in the beginning. It this topic related to ruby? Well, type "man malloc" and look for MMAP_THRESHOLD. Increasing MMAP_THRESHOLD large enough forces malloc() to use brk() instead of mmap(). sbrk(0) doesn't care mmap()-ed memory.