Memory footprint

Memory footprint refers to the amount of main memory that a program uses or references while running.

The word footprint generally refers to the extent of physical dimensions that an object occupies, giving a sense of its size. In computing, the memory footprint of an executable program indicates its runtime memory requirements, while the program executes. This includes all sorts of active memory regions like code segment containing (mostly) program instructions (and occasionally constants), data segment (both initialized and uninitialized), heap memory, call stack, plus memory required to hold any additional data structures, such as symbol tables, debugging data structures, open files, shared libraries mapped to the current process, etc., that the program ever needs while executing and will be loaded at least once during the entire run.