To check the memory usage of a C++ program on POSIX-compliant systems (like Linux, macOS, BSD) using getrusage, you can access the ru_maxrss field of the rusage structure. This field provides the maximum resident set size (maximum amount of physical RAM used) in KB.
#include <sys/resource.h>
#include <iostream>
struct rusage usage;
if( getrusage(RUSAGE_SELF, &usage) == 0 ) {
std::cout << usage.ru_maxrss / 1024 << " MB" << std::endl;
}