How to see top processes sorted by actual memory usage

Question

I have a server with 12G of memory  A fragment of top is shown below   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  CPU  MEM    TIME   COMMAND                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       12979 frank  20   0  206m  21m  12m S   11  0 2  26667 24 krfb                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           13 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    1  0 0  36 25 04 ksoftirqd 3                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    59 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0 0   4 53 00 ata 2                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          2155 root      20   0  662m  37m 8364 S    0  0 3 338 10 25 Xorg                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           4560 frank  20   0  8672 1300  852 R    0  0 0   0 00 03 top                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            12981 frank  20   0  987m  27m  15m S    0  0 2  45 10 82 amarok                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         24908 frank  20   0 16648  708  548 S    0  0 0   2 08 84 wrapper                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        1 root      20   0  8072  608  572 S    0  0 0   0 47 36 init                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0 0   0 00 00 kthreadd   The free -m shows the following                total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached Mem          12038      11676        362          0        599       9745 -   buffers cache        1331      10706 Swap          2204        257       1946   If I understand correctly  the system has only 362 MB of available memory  My question is  How can I find out which process is consuming most of the memory   Just as background info  the system is running 64bit OpenSuse 12

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ps aux --sort   mem   from procps  ps  default on Ubuntu 12 04  generates output like   USER       PID  CPU  MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND     tomcat7   3658  0 1  3 3 1782792 124692        Sl   10 12   0 25  usr lib jvm java-7-oracle bin java -Djava util logging config file  var lib tomcat7 conf logging properties -D root      1284  1 5  3 7 452692 142796 tty7    Ssl  10 11   3 19  usr bin X -core  0 -seat seat0 -auth  var run lightdm root  0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch ciro      2286  0 3  3 8 1316000 143312        Sl   10 11   0 49 compiz ciro      5150  0 0  4 4 660620 168488 pts 0   Sl   11 01   0 08 unicorn rails worker 1  -p 3000 -E development -c config unicorn rb              ciro      5147  0 0  4 5 660556 170920 pts 0   Sl   11 01   0 08 unicorn rails worker 0  -p 3000 -E development -c config unicorn rb              ciro      5142  0 1  6 3 2581944 239408 pts 0  Sl   11 01   0 17 sidekiq 2 17 8 gitlab  0 of 25 busy                                                                            ciro      2386  3 6 16 0 1752740 605372        Sl   10 11   7 38  usr lib firefox firefox   So here Firefox is the top consumer with 16  of my memory   You may also be interested in   ps aux --sort   cpu

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use quick tip using top command in linux unix    top   and then hit Shift m  i e  write a capital M    From man top  SORTING of task window   For compatibility  this top supports most of the former top sort keys    Since this is primarily a service to former top users  these commands do   not appear on any help screen      command   sorted-field                  supported       A         start time  non-display       No       M          MEM                          Yes       N         PID                           Yes       P          CPU                          Yes       T         TIME                          Yes   Or alternatively  hit Shift   f   then choose the display to order by memory usage by hitting key n then press Enter  You will see active process ordered by memory usage

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You have this simple command      free -h

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First  repeat this mantra for a little while   unused memory is wasted memory   The Linux kernel keeps around huge amounts of file metadata and files that were requested  until something that looks more important pushes that data out  It s why you can run   find  home -type f -name    mp3  find  home -type f -name    aac    and have the second find instance run at ridiculous speed   Linux only leaves a little bit of memory  free  to handle spikes in memory usage without too much effort   Second  you want to find the processes that are eating all your memory  in top use the M command to sort by memory use  Feel free to ignore the VIRT column  that just tells you how much virtual memory has been allocated  not how much memory the process is using  RES reports how much memory is resident  or currently in ram  as opposed to swapped to disk or never actually allocated in the first place  despite being requested    But  since RES will count e g   lib libc so 6 memory once for nearly every process  it isn t exactly an awesome measure of how much memory a process is using  The SHR column reports how much memory is shared with other processes  but there is no guarantee that another process is actually sharing -- it could be sharable  just no one else wants to share   The smem tool is designed to help users better gage just how much memory should really be blamed on each individual process  It does some clever work to figure out what is really unique  what is shared  and proportionally tallies the shared memory to the processes sharing it  smem may help you understand where your memory is going better than top will  but top is an excellent first tool

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ps aux   awk   print  2   4   11     sort -k2rn   head -n 10    Adding -n numeric flag to sort command

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First you should read an explanation on the output of free  Bottom line  you have at least 10 7 GB of memory readily usable by processes   Then you should define what  memory usage  is for a process  it s not easy or unambiguous  trust me    Then we might be able to help more  -

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List and Sort Processes by Memory Usage   ps -e -orss  args    sort -b -k1 1n   pr -TW COLUMNS

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How to total up used memory by process name   Sometimes even looking at the biggest single processes there is still a lot of used memory unaccounted for  To check if there are a lot of the same smaller processes using the memory you can use a command like the following which uses awk to sum up the total memory used by processes of the same name   ps -e -orss  args   awk   print  1      2     awk   tot  2    1 count  2     END  for  i in tot   print tot i  i count i       sort -n   e g  output  9344 docker 1 9948 nginx  4 22500  usr sbin NetworkManager 1 24704 sleep 69 26436  usr sbin sshd 15 34828 -bash 19 39268 sshd  10 58384  bin su 28 59876  bin ksh 29 73408  usr bin python 2 78176  usr bin dockerd 1 134396  bin sh 84 5407132 bin naughty small proc 1432 28061916  usr local jdk bin java 7

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You can see memory usage by executing this code in your terminal     watch -n2 free -m   htop

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you can specify which column to sort by  with following steps    steps    top   shift   F   select a column from the list     e g  n means sort by memory    press enter   ok

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Building on gaoithe s answer  I attempted to make the memory units display in megabytes  and sorted by memory descending limited to 15 entries  ps -e -orss  args   awk   print  1  quot   quot   2     awk   tot  2    1 count  2     END  for  i in tot   print tot i  i count i       sort -n   tail -n 15   sort -nr   awk    hr  1 1024  printf  quot  13 2fM quot   hr   print  quot  t quot   2           588 03M   usr sbin apache2        275 64M   usr sbin mysqld        138 23M  vim         97 04M  -bash         40 96M  ssh         34 28M  tmux         17 48M   opt digitalocean bin do-agent         13 42M   lib systemd systemd-journald         10 68M   lib systemd systemd         10 62M   usr bin redis-server          8 75M  awk          7 89M  sshd           4 63M   usr sbin sshd          4 56M   lib systemd systemd-logind          4 01M   usr sbin rsyslogd  Here s an example alias to use it in a bash config file      alias topmem  quot ps -e -orss  args   awk   print   1   quot    quot    2     awk   tot   2     1 count   2     END  for  i in tot   print tot i  i count i       sort -n   tail -n 15   sort -nr   awk    hr   1 1024  printf   quot  13 2fM  quot   hr   print   quot  t  quot    2    quot   Then you can just type topmem on the command line

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This very second in time ps -U   whoami  -eom pid pmem pcpu comm   head -n4  Continuously updating watch -n 1  ps -U   whoami  -eom pid pmem pcpu comm   head -n4   I also added a few goodies here you might appreciate  or you might ignore  -n 1 watch and update every second -U   whoami  To show only your processes    some command  evaluates now   head -n4 To only show the header and 3 processes at a time bc often you just need high usage line items   1-4  says my first argument  1 I want to default to 4  unless I provide it If you are using a mac you may need to install watch first brew install watch Alternatively you might use a function psm        watch -n 1  quot ps -eom pid pmem pcpu comm   head -n   1-4  quot        EXAMPLES         psm        psm 10

[linux] How to see top processes sorted by actual memory usage?

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