hi, [now to the list, also] maybe all of these mathematical formulae can be made into a smallish perl script that grabs this info from `top ax`. I am not sure that top is the proper source of memory usage across platforms. In fact, as I am not a unix old-timer, I should be asking *where* to get that info reliably from. With that info, I could prepare such a script ... it'd be quite useful, I'm building a few servers with very low memory. Stas wrote (privately) that there is no consistent cross platform command that will reliably report memory usage for a given set of processes. He also mentioned Apache::GTop, but I was thinking about an external script. A script I can call from the command line and will evaluate my three HTTPDs and their children, and report global and detailed memory usage. It should be a general purpose tool, not something mod_perl-dependant at all. It might be system dependant, of course. It could be checking what OS it's on and call the proper command accordingly. martin