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
.
List and Sort Processes by Memory Usage:
ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS
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
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
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 :-)
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 "ps -eom pid,pmem,pcpu,comm | head -n ${1-4}"
# EXAMPLES:
# psm
# psm 10
}
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
You have this simple command:
$ free -h
ps aux | awk '{print $2, $4, $11}' | sort -k2rn | head -n 10
(Adding -n numeric flag to sort command.)
You can see memory usage by executing this code in your terminal:
$ watch -n2 free -m
$ htop
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 " " $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("%13.2fM", hr); print "\t" $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="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 | tail -n 15 | sort -nr | awk '{ hr=\$1/1024; printf(\"%13.2fM\", hr); print \"\t\" \$2 }'"
Then you can just type topmem
on the command line.
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'
Source: Stackoverflow.com