How to log the memory consumption on Linux?

Question

Is there any ready-to-use solution to log the memory consumption from the start of the system? I'd like to log the data to simple text file or some database so I can analyze it later.

I'm working on Linux 2.4-based embedded system. I need to debug the problem related to memory consumption. My application automatically start on every system start. I need the way to get the data with timestamps from regular intervals (as often as possible), so I can track down problem.

The symptoms of my problem: when system starts it launched my main application and GUI to visualize the main parameters of the system. GUI based on GTK+ (X server). If I disable GUI and X server then my application works OK. If I enable GUI and X server it does not work when I have 256 MiB or 512 MiB of physical memory installed on the motherboard. If I have 1 GiB of memory installed then everything is OK.

Answer 1

The following script prints time stamps and a header.

#!/bin/bash -e

echo "      date     time $(free -m | grep total | sed -E 's/^    (.*)/\1/g')"
while true; do
    echo "$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') $(free -m | grep Mem: | sed 's/Mem://g')"
    sleep 1
done

The output looks like this (tested on Ubuntu 15.04, 64-bit).

      date     time          total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
2015-08-01 13:57:27          24002      13283      10718        522        693       2308
2015-08-01 13:57:28          24002      13321      10680        522        693       2308
2015-08-01 13:57:29          24002      13355      10646        522        693       2308
2015-08-01 13:57:30          24002      13353      10648        522        693       2308