The bigger problem is that there's no good number that captures the memory impact of a process on modern unified-memory page-cache-ful architectures. Practically nobody gets this right, and the author of the article is himself glosses over some important details. Every byte of address space is either allocated and backed by some memory object ("reserved" memory) or it's unallocated. Commit charge is a measure of the…
Lovely post, but I now realize that I am rather ignorant of the interplay between processes and the kernel with regards to memory allocation. Any ideas on cool stuff to read to remedy this?
Drepper's What every programmer should know about memory is a little old and goes into perhaps unnecessary detail at times, but is a great place to start.