Fatest way to get available memory on Linux

bs55

Hi,
I am developping a video recording program but it sometime exhaust the system's memory.
I've looked on forums and the simplest solution to get the available memory was this one:

QProcess qp;
while (!stopCapture) {
        /* Gets captured image from camera and stores it in a vector */

        qp.start("awk", QStringList() << "/MemAvailable/ {print $2}" << "/proc/meminfo");
        qp.waitForFinished();
        QString qs_AvailableMemory = qp.readAllStandardOutput();
        if (qs_AvailableMemory.toLong() / 1024 < 128)
                break;
}
qp.close();

The problem is that this code takes about 10 milliseconds to execute, which causes dropped frames.
Is there a faster way to get the system's available memory?

aha_1980

@bs55

I guess there might be better ways to achive your final solution video recording (temporary files, e.g.).

But for your question: a faster way to read /proc/meminfo (which is just a file on a pseuso filesystem) may be using QFile. The fastest way, however would be using API: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sysinfo.2.html

Please note, that both solutions are not portable code (well, sysinfo may work on other Unixes and maybe even on macOS).

bs55

@aha_1980 Thank you for your answer.
Unfortunatly saving the file is not an option as it takes about 25 ms to save an image so I cannot do it while recording without dropping at least 4 frames...
Parsing the /proc/meminfo is just slightly faster than using the AWK command but not fast enough.
I will look into this sysinfo API.