How do I discover memory usage of my application in Android?

How can I find the memory used on my Android application, programmatically?

I hope there is a way to do it. Plus, how do I get the free memory of the phone too?

Note that memory usage on modern operating systems like Linux is an extremely complicated and difficult to understand area. In fact the chances of you actually correctly interpreting whatever numbers you get is extremely low. (Pretty much every time I look at memory usage numbers with other engineers, there is always a long discussion about what they actually mean that only results in a vague conclusion.)

Note: we now have much more extensive documentation on Managing Your App's Memory that covers much of the material here and is more up-to-date with the state of Android.

First thing is to probably read the last part of this article which has some discussion of how memory is managed on Android:

Service API changes starting with Android 2.0

Now ActivityManager.getMemoryInfo() is our highest-level API for looking at overall memory usage. This is mostly there to help an application gauge how close the system is coming to having no more memory for background processes, thus needing to start killing needed processes like services. For pure Java applications, this should be of little use, since the Java heap limit is there in part to avoid one app from being able to stress the system to this point.

Going lower-level, you can use the Debug API to get raw kernel-level information about memory usage: android.os.Debug.MemoryInfo

Note starting with 2.0 there is also an API, ActivityManager.getProcessMemoryInfo, to get this information about another process: ActivityManager.getProcessMemoryInfo(int[])

This returns a low-level MemoryInfo structure with all of this data:

/** The proportional set size for dalvik. */
    public int dalvikPss;
    /** The private dirty pages used by dalvik. */
    public int dalvikPrivateDirty;
    /** The shared dirty pages used by dalvik. */
    public int dalvikSharedDirty;

    /** The proportional set size for the native heap. */
    public int nativePss;
    /** The private dirty pages used by the native heap. */
    public int nativePrivateDirty;
    /** The shared dirty pages used by the native heap. */
    public int nativeSharedDirty;

    /** The proportional set size for everything else. */
    public int otherPss;
    /** The private dirty pages used by everything else. */
    public int otherPrivateDirty;
    /** The shared dirty pages used by everything else. */
    public int otherSharedDirty;

But as to what the difference is between Pss, PrivateDirty, and SharedDirty... well now the fun begins.

A lot of memory in Android (and Linux systems in general) is actually shared across multiple processes. So how much memory a processes uses is really not clear. Add on top of that paging out to disk (let alone swap which we don't use on Android) and it is even less clear.

Thus if you were to take all of the physical RAM actually mapped in to each process, and add up all of the processes, you would probably end up with a number much greater than the actual total RAM.

The Pss number is a metric the kernel computes that takes into account memory sharing -- basically each page of RAM in a process is scaled by a ratio of the number of other processes also using that page. This way you can (in theory) add up the pss across all processes to see the total RAM they are using, and compare pss between processes to get a rough idea of their relative weight.

The other interesting metric here is PrivateDirty, which is basically the amount of RAM inside the process that can not be paged to disk (it is not backed by the same data on disk), and is not shared with any other processes. Another way to look at this is the RAM that will become available to the system when that process goes away (and probably quickly subsumed into caches and other uses of it).

That is pretty much the SDK APIs for this. However there is more you can do as a developer with your device.

Using adb, there is a lot of information you can get about the memory use of a running system. A common one is the command adb shell dumpsys meminfo which will spit out a bunch of information about the memory use of each Java process, containing the above info as well as a variety of other things. You can also tack on the name or pid of a single process to see, for example adb shell dumpsys meminfo system give me the system process:

MEMINFO in pid 890 [system]
native dalvik other total
size: 10940 7047 N/A 17987
allocated: 8943 5516 N/A 14459
free: 336 1531 N/A 1867
(Pss): 4585 9282 11916 25783
(shared dirty): 2184 3596 916 6696
(priv dirty): 4504 5956 7456 17916

Objects
Views: 149 ViewRoots: 4
AppContexts: 13 Activities: 0
Assets: 4 AssetManagers: 4
Local Binders: 141 Proxy Binders: 158
Death Recipients: 49
Op

Stack Overflow Q#2298208, score: 1046