Use virtual instead of resident memory size

[Celelibi]

It looks like memory_profiler prefer to use the "RSS" field over the "VMS" field. I'm not sure I understand this choice as it exclude everything that's swapped to disk.

That reduces the usefulness of this tool to optimize the memory usage since:

• The kernel can decide whenever it wants to swap some pages to disk, reducing the memory usage.
• The kernel can decide to bring some pages back to the RAM whenever it wants.
• Once the application uses all the RAM available, new allocations won't show up as some older pages are swapped out.
• Applications that could benefit the most from a memory profiler are those that consume a lot of memory and are likely to be partially swapped.

So, maybe an option could be given to indicate whether we want the resident memory size or the virtual memory size. What do you think?

[fabianp]

@Celelibi , which backend are you refering to? memory_profiler uses different backends to get the memory consumption, such as psutils or using ps on UNIX when psutils is not available ...

In any case, you have a point: by default the full memory consumption (including swap space) should be reported. I would gladly accept patches correcting this behavior ...

[dendibakh]

I suggest plotting both VMS and RSS at the same time.