diff --git a/Lib/test/memory_watchdog.py b/Lib/test/memory_watchdog.py
@@ -1,21 +1,40 @@
 """Memory watchdog: periodically read the memory usage of the main test process
 and print it out, until terminated."""
-# stdin should refer to the process' /proc/<PID>/statm: we don't pass the
-# process' PID to avoid a race condition in case of - unlikely - PID recycling.
-# If the process crashes, reading from the /proc entry will fail with ESRCH.
 
 
 import sys
 import time
-from test.support import get_pagesize
-
-
-while True:
-    page_size = get_pagesize()
-    sys.stdin.seek(0)
-    statm = sys.stdin.read()
-    data = int(statm.split()[5])
-    sys.stdout.write(" ... process data size: {data:.1f}G\n"
-                     .format(data=data * page_size / (1024 ** 3)))
-    sys.stdout.flush()
-    time.sleep(1)
+from test.libregrtest.utils import get_process_memory_usage
+
+
+ONE_GIB = (1024 ** 3)
+
+
+def watchdog(pid):
+    while True:
+        mem = get_process_memory_usage(pid)
+        if mem is None:
+            # get_process_memory_usage() is not supported on the platform,
+            # or something went wrong. Exit since the next call is likely to
+            # fail the same way.
+            return
+
+        # Prefer sys.stdout.write() to print() to use a single write() syscall.
+        # print(msg) calls write(msg.encode()) and then write(b"\n").
+        sys.stdout.write(f" ... process data size: {mem / ONE_GIB:.1f} GiB\n")
+        sys.stdout.flush()
+        time.sleep(1)
+
+def main():
+    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
+        print(f"usage: python {sys.argv[0]} pid")
+        sys.exit(1)
+    pid = int(sys.argv[1])
+
+    try:
+        watchdog(pid)
+    except KeyboardInterrupt:
+        pass
+
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+    main()
diff --git a/Lib/test/support/__init__.py b/Lib/test/support/__init__.py
@@ -1241,29 +1241,20 @@ class _MemoryWatchdog:
     """
 
     def __init__(self):
-        self.procfile = '/proc/{pid}/statm'.format(pid=os.getpid())
         self.started = False
 
     def start(self):
-        try:
-            f = open(self.procfile, 'r')
-        except OSError as e:
-            logging.getLogger(__name__).warning('/proc not available for stats: %s', e, exc_info=e)
-            sys.stderr.flush()
-            return
-
         import subprocess
-        with f:
-            watchdog_script = findfile("memory_watchdog.py")
-            self.mem_watchdog = subprocess.Popen([sys.executable, watchdog_script],
-                                                 stdin=f,
-                                                 stderr=subprocess.DEVNULL)
+        watchdog_script = findfile("memory_watchdog.py")
+        cmd = [sys.executable, watchdog_script, str(os.getpid())]
+        self.mem_watchdog = subprocess.Popen(cmd)
         self.started = True
 
     def stop(self):
-        if self.started:
-            self.mem_watchdog.terminate()
-            self.mem_watchdog.wait()
+        if not self.started:
+            return
+        self.mem_watchdog.terminate()
+        self.mem_watchdog.wait()
 
 
 def bigmemtest(size, memuse, dry_run=True):
@@ -1296,8 +1287,8 @@ def wrapper(self):
 
             if real_max_memuse and verbose:
                 print()
-                print(" ... expected peak memory use: {peak:.1f}G"
-                      .format(peak=size * memuse / (1024 ** 3)))
+                peak = (size * memuse) / (1024 ** 3)
+                print(f" ... expected peak memory use: {peak:.1f} GiB")
                 watchdog = _MemoryWatchdog()
                 watchdog.start()
             else: