Completely off-topic to optimizing Go, but you may want to look at smem - it does what you implemented (including looking through a subset of processes) but inc

Completely off-topic to optimizing Go, but you may want to look at smem - it does what you implemented (including looking through a subset of processes) but includes a few more useful measures of memory usage that help in the presence of multiple processes from the same binary - http://www.selenic.com/smem/ http://www.selenic.com/smem/