The memory footprint for phusion passenger should be determined using passenger-memory-stats. See http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#_inspecting_memory_usage
I would note the following comment about RSS field:
The Private or private dirty RSS field shows the real memory usage of processes. Here, we see that all the Apache worker processes only take less than 1 MB memory each. This is a lot less than the 50 MB-ish memory usage as shown in the VMSize column (which is what a lot of people think is the real memory usage, but is actually not).
They provided a good example on memory output:
[bash@localhost root]# passenger-memory-stats ------------- Apache processes --------------. PID PPID Threads VMSize Private Name ---------------------------------------------. 5947 1 9 90.6 MB 0.5 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 5948 5947 1 18.9 MB 0.7 MB /usr/sbin/fcgi-pm -k start 6029 5947 1 42.7 MB 0.5 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 6030 5947 1 42.7 MB 0.5 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 6031 5947 1 42.5 MB 0.3 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 6033 5947 1 42.5 MB 0.4 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 6034 5947 1 50.5 MB 0.4 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 23482 5947 1 82.6 MB 0.4 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start ### Processes: 8 ### Total private dirty RSS: 3.50 MB --------- Passenger processes ---------. PID Threads VMSize Private Name ---------------------------------------. 6026 1 10.9 MB 4.7 MB Passenger spawn server 23481 1 26.7 MB 3.0 MB Passenger FrameworkSpawner: 2.0.2 23791 1 26.8 MB 2.9 MB Passenger ApplicationSpawner: /var/www/projects/app1-foobar 23793 1 26.9 MB 17.1 MB Rails: /var/www/projects/app1-foobar ### Processes: 4 ### Total private dirty RSS: 27.76 M