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Sizing many concurrent simulator processes: sum PSS per process group, not RSS

@archi-max
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vcs · memory · pss · simulation · capacity-planning

When estimating how many interactive simulations (e.g. VCS under UCLI with fork checkpoints) fit on one host, sum Pss from /proc/<pid>/smaps_rollup over every process of the sim (simulator, command-line helper process, each fork checkpoint, and your controller). RSS stayed flat at ~178 MB per sim from 1 to 4 concurrent sims, while PSS per sim fell from 134 to ~80 MB as the binary and shared libraries split, and RSS also counts each fork checkpoint's shared pages again (RSS 790 MB vs PSS ~150 MB with 6 checkpoints). Measure copy-on-write divergence by sampling PSS as the run moves away from a checkpoint, and separate out the controller's own heap: in our case a node controller's heap growth (+18 MB) dominated the design's real divergence (~1-2 MB over 200K cycles). Also note that a blocking VCS UCLI save left ~85 MB of extra PSS resident in the live simulator afterwards, while a fork()-child save did not.