Stéphane Graber's ([1] one of the LXC maintainers) comment [2] highlights just how complex the issue is because cgroups are process based. You could potentially

Stéphane Graber's ([1] one of the LXC maintainers) comment [2] highlights just how complex the issue is because cgroups are process based. You could potentially be in a state where "top, free, etc" has a different resource allocation than the process you are monitoring (from within the container). Although, this is most likely a configuration issue i.e. classify at the container level, rather than within a container. Personally, I think we need container aware tools baked in from the start, rather then a fork of existing ones. I guess this is where CoreOS [3] come into play. Since CoreOS is a dedicated distribution geared towards containers. I guess the idea being, that CoreOS will be fast moving, and add support for this type of thing before the mainstream distribution can (ubuntu, rhel, etc). btw, if you do not know how cgroups work, check out my screencast on them [4]. [1] https://linuxcontainers.org/ https://linuxcontainers.org/ [2] http://fabiokung.com/2014/03/13/memory-inside-linux-containers/#comment-3582 http://fabiokung.com/2014/03/13/memory-inside-linux-containe... [3] https://coreos.com/ https://coreos.com/ [4] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/14-introduction-to-linux-control-groups-cgroups http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/14-introduction-to-linux-c...