How to find out which processes are using swap space in Linux

Question

Under Linux  how do I find out which process is using the swap space more

User · Answer

On MacOSX  you run top command as well but need to type  o  then  vsize  then ENTER

User · Answer

You can use Procpath  author here   to simplify parsing of VmSwap from  proc  PID status    procpath record -f stat cmdline status -r 1 -d db sqlite   sqlite3 -column db sqlite      SELECT status name  status vmswap FROM record ORDER BY status vmswap DESC LIMIT 5  Web Content  192136        okular       186872        thunderbird  183692        Web Content  143404        MainThread   86300  You can also plot VmSwap of processes of interest over time like this  Here I m recording my Firefox process tree while opening a couple tens of tabs along with statrting a memory-hungry application to try to cause it to swap  which wasn t convincing for Firefox  but your kilometrage may vary     procpath record -f stat cmdline status -i 1 -d db2 sqlite         children     stat pid    6029      interrupt by Ctrl C   procpath plot -d db2 sqlite -q cpu --custom-value-expr status vmswap     --title  quot CPU usage    vs Swap  kB quot

User · Answer

I suppose you could get a good guess by running top and looking for active processes using a lot of memory  Doing this programatically is harder---just look at the endless debates about the Linux OOM killer heuristics   Swapping is a function of having more memory in active use than is installed  so it is usually hard to blame it on a single process  If it is an ongoing problem  the best solution is to install more memory  or make other systemic changes

User · Answer

Since the year 2015 kernel patch that adds SwapPss  https   lore kernel org patchwork patch 570506   one can finally get proportional swap count meaning that if a process has swapped a lot and then it forks  both forked processes will be reported to swap 50  each  And if either then forks  each process is counted 33  of the swapped pages so if you count all those swap usages together  you get real swap usage instead of value multiplied by process count   In short    cd  proc  for pid in  0-9    do printf   5s  6s  s n    pid     awk  BEGIN sum 0   SwapPss   sum   2  END print sum    pid smaps      cat  pid comm    done   sort -k2n 2 -k1n 1    First column is pid  second column is swap usage in KiB and rest of the line is command being executed  Identical swap counts are sorted by pid   Above may emit lines such as   awk  cmd  line 1  fatal  cannot open file  15407 smaps  for reading  No such file or directory    which simply means that process with pid 15407 ended between seeing it in the list for  proc  and reading the process smaps file  If that matters to you  simply add 2 gt  dev null to the end  Note that you ll potentially lose any other possible diagnostics as well   In real world example case  this changes other tools reporting  40 MB swap usage for each apache child running on one server to actual usage of between 7-3630 KB really used per child

User · Answer

Here s another variant of the script  but meant to give more readable output  you need to run this as root to get exact results       bin bash        find-out-what-is-using-your-swap sh       -- Get current swap usage for all running processes       --       -- rev 0 3  2012-09-03  Jan Smid          - alignment and intendation  sorting       -- rev 0 2  2012-08-09  Mikko Rantalainen - pipe the output to  sort -nk3  to get sorted output       -- rev 0 1  2011-05-27  Erik Ljungstrom   - initial version   SCRIPT NAME  basename  0   SORT  kb                      pid kB name  as first parameter   default  kb      1           amp  amp    SORT   1          -x  which mktemp     amp  amp    echo  ERROR  mktemp is not available    exit    MKTEMP  which mktemp   TMP    MKTEMP  -d       -d    TMP      amp  amp    echo  ERROR  unable to create temp dir    exit      gt   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  pid   gt   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  kb   gt   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  name   SUM 0  OVERALL 0      echo    OVERALL    gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  overal   for DIR in  find  proc  -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex    proc  0-9      do     PID  echo  DIR   cut -d   -f 3      PROGNAME  ps -p  PID -o comm --no-headers       for SWAP in  grep Swap  DIR smaps 2 gt  dev null  awk    print  2         do         let SUM  SUM  SWAP     done      if     SUM  gt  0         then         echo -n              echo -e    PID  t  SUM  t  PROGNAME    gt  gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  pid          echo -e    SUM  t  PID  t  PROGNAME    gt  gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  kb          echo -e    PROGNAME  t  SUM  t  PID    gt  gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  name      fi     let OVERALL  OVERALL  SUM     SUM 0 done echo    OVERALL    gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  overal  echo  echo  Overall swap used    OVERALL  kB   echo                                             case    SORT   in     name           echo -e  name tkB tpid           echo                                                     cat   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  name sort -r                  kb           echo -e  kB tpid tname           echo                                                     cat   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  kb sort -rh                  pid               echo -e  pid tkB tname           echo                                                     cat   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  pid sort -rh             esac rm -fR    TMP

User · Answer

Gives totals and percentages for process using swap  smem -t -p     Source   https   www cyberciti biz faq linux-which-process-is-using-swap

User · Answer

Since the year 2015 kernel patch that adds SwapPss  https   lore kernel org patchwork patch 570506   one can finally get proportional swap count meaning that if a process has swapped a lot and then it forks  both forked processes will be reported to swap 50  each  And if either then forks  each process is counted 33  of the swapped pages so if you count all those swap usages together  you get real swap usage instead of value multiplied by process count   In short    cd  proc  for pid in  0-9    do printf   5s  6s  s n    pid     awk  BEGIN sum 0   SwapPss   sum   2  END print sum    pid smaps      cat  pid comm    done   sort -k2n 2 -k1n 1    First column is pid  second column is swap usage in KiB and rest of the line is command being executed  Identical swap counts are sorted by pid   Above may emit lines such as   awk  cmd  line 1  fatal  cannot open file  15407 smaps  for reading  No such file or directory    which simply means that process with pid 15407 ended between seeing it in the list for  proc  and reading the process smaps file  If that matters to you  simply add 2 gt  dev null to the end  Note that you ll potentially lose any other possible diagnostics as well   In real world example case  this changes other tools reporting  40 MB swap usage for each apache child running on one server to actual usage of between 7-3630 KB really used per child

User · Answer

I don t know of any direct answer as how to find exactly what process is using the swap space  however  this link may be helpful  Another good one is over here  Also  use a good tool like htop to see which processes are using a lot of memory and how much swap overall is being used

User · Answer

I suppose you could get a good guess by running top and looking for active processes using a lot of memory  Doing this programatically is harder---just look at the endless debates about the Linux OOM killer heuristics   Swapping is a function of having more memory in active use than is installed  so it is usually hard to blame it on a single process  If it is an ongoing problem  the best solution is to install more memory  or make other systemic changes

User · Answer

I don t know of any direct answer as how to find exactly what process is using the swap space  however  this link may be helpful  Another good one is over here  Also  use a good tool like htop to see which processes are using a lot of memory and how much swap overall is being used

User · Answer

It s not entirely clear if you mean you want to find the process who has most pages swapped out or process who caused most pages to be swapped out   For the first you may run top and order by swap  press  Op    for the latter you can run vmstat and look for non-zero entries for  so

User · Answer

The best script I found is on this page   http   northernmost org blog find-out-what-is-using-your-swap   Here s one variant of the script and no root needed      bin bash    Get current swap usage for all running processes   Erik Ljungstrom 27 05 2011   Modified by Mikko Rantalainen 2012-08-09   Pipe the output to  sort -nk3  to get sorted output   Modified by Marc Methot 2014-09-18   removed the need for sudo  SUM 0 OVERALL 0 for DIR in  find  proc  -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex    proc  0-9     do     PID  echo  DIR   cut -d   -f 3      PROGNAME  ps -p  PID -o comm --no-headers      for SWAP in  grep VmSwap  DIR status 2 gt  dev null   awk    print  2         do         let SUM  SUM  SWAP     done     if     SUM  gt  0     then         echo  PID  PID swapped  SUM KB   PROGNAME       fi     let OVERALL  OVERALL  SUM     SUM 0 done echo  Overall swap used   OVERALL KB

User · Answer

Here s a version that outputs the same as the script by  loolotux  but is much faster while less readable   That loop takes about 10 secs on my machine  my version takes 0 019 s  which mattered to me because I wanted to make it into a cgi page       join -t   -1 3 -2 3        lt  grep VmSwap  proc   status   egrep -v   proc self thread-self    sort -k3 3 --field-separator            lt  grep -H     --binary-files text  proc   cmdline  tr   0      cut -c 1-200 egrep -v   proc self  thread-self  sort -k3 3 --field-separator             cut -d  -f1 4 7-         sed  s status    s cmdline            sort -h -k3 3 --field-separator          tee  gt  awk -F    s   3  END  printf   nTotal Swap Usage     0f kB n  s     dev null

User · Answer

I adapted a different script on the web to this long one-liner      date for f in  proc  0-9   status  do     awk   k  1   2  END   if  k  VmSwap     print k  Pid    k  Name    k  VmSwap        f 2 gt  dev null      done   sort -n       Which I then throw into a cronjob and redirect output to a logfile  The information here is the same as accumulating the Swap  entries in the smaps file  but if you want to be sure  you can use     date for m in  proc   smaps do    awk    Swap   s   2  END   if  s  print FILENAME s     m 2 gt  dev null    done   tr -dc    0-9  n   sort -k 1n      The output of this version is in two columns  pid  swap amount   In the above version  the tr strips the non-numeric components  In both cases  the output is sorted numerically by pid

User · Answer

Run top then press OpEnter  Now processes should be sorted by their swap usage   Here is an update as my original answer does not provide an exact answer to the problem as pointed out in the comments  From the htop FAQ      It is not possible to get the exact size of used swap space of a   process  Top fakes this information by making SWAP   VIRT - RES  but   that is not a good metric  because other stuff such as video memory   counts on VIRT as well  for example  top says my X process is using   81M of swap  but it also reports my system as a whole is using only 2M   of swap  Therefore  I will not add a similar Swap column to htop   because I don t know a reliable way to get this information  actually    I don t think it s possible to get an exact number  because of shared   pages

User · Answer

iotop is a very useful tool  It gives live stats of I O and swap usage per process thread  By default it shows per thread but you can do iotop -P to get per process info  This is not available by default  You may have to install via rpm apt

User · Answer

Another script variant avoiding the loop in shell      bin bash grep VmSwap  proc  0-9   status   awk -F    -v sort   1            split  1 pid        Split first field on       split  3 swp        Split third field on space     cmdlinefile     proc  pid 3   cmdline    Build the cmdline filepath     getline pname pid 3    lt  cmdlinefile   Get the command line from pid     swap pid 3     sprintf   6i  s  swp 1  swp 2     Store the swap used  with unit to avoid rebuilding at print      sum  swp 1    Sum the swap       END       OFS   t    Change the output separator to tabulation     print  Pid   Swap used   Command line    Print header     if sort          getline max pid  lt    proc sys kernel pid max        for p 1 p lt  max pid p              if p in pname  print p swap p  pname p    print the values               else         for p in pname      Loop over all pids found         print p swap p  pname p    print the values                   print  Total swap used   sum   print the sum        Standard usage is script sh to get the usage per program with random order  down to how awk stores its hashes  or script sh 1 to sort the output by pid   I hope I ve commented the code enough to tell what it does

User · Answer

Yet two more variants   Because top or htop could be not installed on small systems  browsing  proc stay always possible   Even on small systems  you will found a shell     A shell variant   Not bash only   This is exactly same than lolotux script  but without any fork to grep  awk or ps  This is a lot quicker   And as bash is one of the poorest shell regarding performance  a little work was done to ensure this script will run well under dash  busybox and some other  Then   thanks to St  phane Chazelas   become a lot quicker again      bin sh    Get current swap usage for all running processes   Felix Hauri 2016-08-05   Rewritted without fork  Inspired by first stuff from   Erik Ljungstrom 27 05 2011   Modified by Mikko Rantalainen 2012-08-09   Pipe the output to  sort -nk3  to get sorted output   Modified by Marc Methot 2014-09-18   removed the need for sudo  OVERALL 0 rifs  printf     t   for FILE in  proc  0-9   status  do     SUM 0     while IFS   rifs  read FIELD VALUE  do         case  FIELD in             Pid      PID  VALUE                     Name     PROGNAME   VALUE                 VmSwap   SUM    SUM   VALUE                   esac     done  lt  FILE        SUM -gt 0    amp  amp          printf  PID   9d  swapped   11d KB   s  n   PID  SUM   PROGNAME      OVERALL    OVERALL SUM   done printf  Total swapped memory   14u KB n   OVERALL   Don t forgot to double quote   PROGNAME    See St  phane Chazelas s comment   read FIELD PROGNAME  lt   lt       perl -ne  BEGIN  0                   print if   Name    proc self status   echo  FIELD   PROGNAME    Don t try echo  PROGNAME without double quote on sensible system  and be ready to kill current shell before   And a perl version  As this become a not so simple script  time is comming to write a dedicated tool by using more efficient language      usr bin perl -w  use strict  use Getopt  Std  my   tot  mtot   0 0   my  procs   my  opts  getopt       opts    sub sortres       return  a  lt   gt   b                                          if  opts  p        return  procs  a - gt   cmd   cmp  procs  b - gt   cmd          if  opts  c        return  procs  a - gt   mswap    lt   gt   procs  b - gt   mswap      if  opts  m        return  procs  a - gt   swap    lt   gt   procs  b - gt   swap        opendir my  dh   proc    for my  pid  grep     d     readdir  dh        if  open my  fh   lt  proc  pid status             my   sum  nam   0              while   lt  fh gt                  sum   1 if   VmSwap  s   d   s                nam  1 if   Name  s   S                       if   sum                 tot   sum               procs  pid - gt   swap    sum               procs  pid - gt   cmd    nam              close  fh              if  open my  fh   lt  proc  pid smaps                      sum 0                  while   lt  fh gt                          sum   1 if   Swap  s   d   s                                                  mtot   sum               procs  pid - gt   mswap    sum            else   close  fh               map       printf  PID   9d  swapped   11d   11d  KB   s  n                procs    - gt   swap     procs    - gt   mswap     procs    - gt   cmd      sort sortres keys  procs  printf  Total swapped memory   14u   11u  KB n    tot  mtot    could by run with one of  -c  sort by command name -p  sort by pid -m  sort by swap values by default  output is sorted by status s vmsize

User · Answer

It s not entirely clear if you mean you want to find the process who has most pages swapped out or process who caused most pages to be swapped out   For the first you may run top and order by swap  press  Op    for the latter you can run vmstat and look for non-zero entries for  so

User · Answer

Yet two more variants   Because top or htop could be not installed on small systems  browsing  proc stay always possible   Even on small systems  you will found a shell     A shell variant   Not bash only   This is exactly same than lolotux script  but without any fork to grep  awk or ps  This is a lot quicker   And as bash is one of the poorest shell regarding performance  a little work was done to ensure this script will run well under dash  busybox and some other  Then   thanks to St  phane Chazelas   become a lot quicker again      bin sh    Get current swap usage for all running processes   Felix Hauri 2016-08-05   Rewritted without fork  Inspired by first stuff from   Erik Ljungstrom 27 05 2011   Modified by Mikko Rantalainen 2012-08-09   Pipe the output to  sort -nk3  to get sorted output   Modified by Marc Methot 2014-09-18   removed the need for sudo  OVERALL 0 rifs  printf     t   for FILE in  proc  0-9   status  do     SUM 0     while IFS   rifs  read FIELD VALUE  do         case  FIELD in             Pid      PID  VALUE                     Name     PROGNAME   VALUE                 VmSwap   SUM    SUM   VALUE                   esac     done  lt  FILE        SUM -gt 0    amp  amp          printf  PID   9d  swapped   11d KB   s  n   PID  SUM   PROGNAME      OVERALL    OVERALL SUM   done printf  Total swapped memory   14u KB n   OVERALL   Don t forgot to double quote   PROGNAME    See St  phane Chazelas s comment   read FIELD PROGNAME  lt   lt       perl -ne  BEGIN  0                   print if   Name    proc self status   echo  FIELD   PROGNAME    Don t try echo  PROGNAME without double quote on sensible system  and be ready to kill current shell before   And a perl version  As this become a not so simple script  time is comming to write a dedicated tool by using more efficient language      usr bin perl -w  use strict  use Getopt  Std  my   tot  mtot   0 0   my  procs   my  opts  getopt       opts    sub sortres       return  a  lt   gt   b                                          if  opts  p        return  procs  a - gt   cmd   cmp  procs  b - gt   cmd          if  opts  c        return  procs  a - gt   mswap    lt   gt   procs  b - gt   mswap      if  opts  m        return  procs  a - gt   swap    lt   gt   procs  b - gt   swap        opendir my  dh   proc    for my  pid  grep     d     readdir  dh        if  open my  fh   lt  proc  pid status             my   sum  nam   0              while   lt  fh gt                  sum   1 if   VmSwap  s   d   s                nam  1 if   Name  s   S                       if   sum                 tot   sum               procs  pid - gt   swap    sum               procs  pid - gt   cmd    nam              close  fh              if  open my  fh   lt  proc  pid smaps                      sum 0                  while   lt  fh gt                          sum   1 if   Swap  s   d   s                                                  mtot   sum               procs  pid - gt   mswap    sum            else   close  fh               map       printf  PID   9d  swapped   11d   11d  KB   s  n                procs    - gt   swap     procs    - gt   mswap     procs    - gt   cmd      sort sortres keys  procs  printf  Total swapped memory   14u   11u  KB n    tot  mtot    could by run with one of  -c  sort by command name -p  sort by pid -m  sort by swap values by default  output is sorted by status s vmsize

User · Answer

I did notice this thread is rather old  but if you happen to stumble upon it  as I just did  another answer is  use smem   Here is a link which tells you both how to install it and how to use it   http   www cyberciti biz faq linux-which-process-is-using-swap

User · Answer

The same answer as  lolotux  but with sorted output  printf  Computing swap usage    n   swap usages  quot        SUM 0     OVERALL 0      for DIR in  find  proc  -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex  quot   proc  0-9   quot       do         PID  quot   printf   s   quot  DIR quot    cut -d   -f 3  quot          PROGNAME  ps -p  PID -o comm --no-headers          for SWAP in  grep VmSwap  DIR status 2 gt  dev null   awk    print  2             do             let SUM  SUM  SWAP         done         if     SUM  gt  0     then             printf  quot  SUM KB   PROGNAME  swapped PID  PID  n quot          fi         let OVERALL  OVERALL  SUM         SUM 0         break     done     printf  9999999999 Overall swap used   s KB n   quot  OVERALL quot    quot   printf   s   quot  swap usages quot    sort -nk1  Example output  Computing swap usage    2064 KB  systemd  swapped PID 1 59620 KB  xfdesktop  swapped PID 21405 64484 KB  nemo  swapped PID 763627 66740 KB  teamviewerd  swapped PID 1618 68244 KB  flameshot  swapped PID 84209 763136 KB  plugin host  swapped PID 1881345 1412480 KB  java  swapped PID 43402 3864548 KB  sublime text  swapped PID 1881327 9999999999 Overall swap used  2064 KB

User · Answer

Run top then press OpEnter  Now processes should be sorted by their swap usage   Here is an update as my original answer does not provide an exact answer to the problem as pointed out in the comments  From the htop FAQ      It is not possible to get the exact size of used swap space of a   process  Top fakes this information by making SWAP   VIRT - RES  but   that is not a good metric  because other stuff such as video memory   counts on VIRT as well  for example  top says my X process is using   81M of swap  but it also reports my system as a whole is using only 2M   of swap  Therefore  I will not add a similar Swap column to htop   because I don t know a reliable way to get this information  actually    I don t think it s possible to get an exact number  because of shared   pages

User · Answer

Run top then press OpEnter  Now processes should be sorted by their swap usage   Here is an update as my original answer does not provide an exact answer to the problem as pointed out in the comments  From the htop FAQ      It is not possible to get the exact size of used swap space of a   process  Top fakes this information by making SWAP   VIRT - RES  but   that is not a good metric  because other stuff such as video memory   counts on VIRT as well  for example  top says my X process is using   81M of swap  but it also reports my system as a whole is using only 2M   of swap  Therefore  I will not add a similar Swap column to htop   because I don t know a reliable way to get this information  actually    I don t think it s possible to get an exact number  because of shared   pages

User · Answer

Another script variant avoiding the loop in shell      bin bash grep VmSwap  proc  0-9   status   awk -F    -v sort   1            split  1 pid        Split first field on       split  3 swp        Split third field on space     cmdlinefile     proc  pid 3   cmdline    Build the cmdline filepath     getline pname pid 3    lt  cmdlinefile   Get the command line from pid     swap pid 3     sprintf   6i  s  swp 1  swp 2     Store the swap used  with unit to avoid rebuilding at print      sum  swp 1    Sum the swap       END       OFS   t    Change the output separator to tabulation     print  Pid   Swap used   Command line    Print header     if sort          getline max pid  lt    proc sys kernel pid max        for p 1 p lt  max pid p              if p in pname  print p swap p  pname p    print the values               else         for p in pname      Loop over all pids found         print p swap p  pname p    print the values                   print  Total swap used   sum   print the sum        Standard usage is script sh to get the usage per program with random order  down to how awk stores its hashes  or script sh 1 to sort the output by pid   I hope I ve commented the code enough to tell what it does

User · Answer

I suppose you could get a good guess by running top and looking for active processes using a lot of memory  Doing this programatically is harder---just look at the endless debates about the Linux OOM killer heuristics   Swapping is a function of having more memory in active use than is installed  so it is usually hard to blame it on a single process  If it is an ongoing problem  the best solution is to install more memory  or make other systemic changes

User · Answer

The same answer as  lolotux  but with sorted output  printf  Computing swap usage    n   swap usages  quot        SUM 0     OVERALL 0      for DIR in  find  proc  -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex  quot   proc  0-9   quot       do         PID  quot   printf   s   quot  DIR quot    cut -d   -f 3  quot          PROGNAME  ps -p  PID -o comm --no-headers          for SWAP in  grep VmSwap  DIR status 2 gt  dev null   awk    print  2             do             let SUM  SUM  SWAP         done         if     SUM  gt  0     then             printf  quot  SUM KB   PROGNAME  swapped PID  PID  n quot          fi         let OVERALL  OVERALL  SUM         SUM 0         break     done     printf  9999999999 Overall swap used   s KB n   quot  OVERALL quot    quot   printf   s   quot  swap usages quot    sort -nk1  Example output  Computing swap usage    2064 KB  systemd  swapped PID 1 59620 KB  xfdesktop  swapped PID 21405 64484 KB  nemo  swapped PID 763627 66740 KB  teamviewerd  swapped PID 1618 68244 KB  flameshot  swapped PID 84209 763136 KB  plugin host  swapped PID 1881345 1412480 KB  java  swapped PID 43402 3864548 KB  sublime text  swapped PID 1881327 9999999999 Overall swap used  2064 KB

User · Answer

Run top then press OpEnter  Now processes should be sorted by their swap usage   Here is an update as my original answer does not provide an exact answer to the problem as pointed out in the comments  From the htop FAQ      It is not possible to get the exact size of used swap space of a   process  Top fakes this information by making SWAP   VIRT - RES  but   that is not a good metric  because other stuff such as video memory   counts on VIRT as well  for example  top says my X process is using   81M of swap  but it also reports my system as a whole is using only 2M   of swap  Therefore  I will not add a similar Swap column to htop   because I don t know a reliable way to get this information  actually    I don t think it s possible to get an exact number  because of shared   pages

User · Answer

The top command also contains a field to display the number of page faults for a process  The process with maximum page faults would be the process which is swapping most   For long running daemons it might be that they incur large number of page faults at the beginning and the number does not increase later on  So we need to observe whether the page faults is increasing

User · Answer

I don t know of any direct answer as how to find exactly what process is using the swap space  however  this link may be helpful  Another good one is over here  Also  use a good tool like htop to see which processes are using a lot of memory and how much swap overall is being used

User · Answer

On MacOSX  you run top command as well but need to type  o  then  vsize  then ENTER

User · Answer

The top command also contains a field to display the number of page faults for a process  The process with maximum page faults would be the process which is swapping most   For long running daemons it might be that they incur large number of page faults at the beginning and the number does not increase later on  So we need to observe whether the page faults is increasing

User · Answer

Here s a version that outputs the same as the script by  loolotux  but is much faster while less readable   That loop takes about 10 secs on my machine  my version takes 0 019 s  which mattered to me because I wanted to make it into a cgi page       join -t   -1 3 -2 3        lt  grep VmSwap  proc   status   egrep -v   proc self thread-self    sort -k3 3 --field-separator            lt  grep -H     --binary-files text  proc   cmdline  tr   0      cut -c 1-200 egrep -v   proc self  thread-self  sort -k3 3 --field-separator             cut -d  -f1 4 7-         sed  s status    s cmdline            sort -h -k3 3 --field-separator          tee  gt  awk -F    s   3  END  printf   nTotal Swap Usage     0f kB n  s     dev null

User · Answer

Here s another variant of the script  but meant to give more readable output  you need to run this as root to get exact results       bin bash        find-out-what-is-using-your-swap sh       -- Get current swap usage for all running processes       --       -- rev 0 3  2012-09-03  Jan Smid          - alignment and intendation  sorting       -- rev 0 2  2012-08-09  Mikko Rantalainen - pipe the output to  sort -nk3  to get sorted output       -- rev 0 1  2011-05-27  Erik Ljungstrom   - initial version   SCRIPT NAME  basename  0   SORT  kb                      pid kB name  as first parameter   default  kb      1           amp  amp    SORT   1          -x  which mktemp     amp  amp    echo  ERROR  mktemp is not available    exit    MKTEMP  which mktemp   TMP    MKTEMP  -d       -d    TMP      amp  amp    echo  ERROR  unable to create temp dir    exit      gt   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  pid   gt   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  kb   gt   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  name   SUM 0  OVERALL 0      echo    OVERALL    gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  overal   for DIR in  find  proc  -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex    proc  0-9      do     PID  echo  DIR   cut -d   -f 3      PROGNAME  ps -p  PID -o comm --no-headers       for SWAP in  grep Swap  DIR smaps 2 gt  dev null  awk    print  2         do         let SUM  SUM  SWAP     done      if     SUM  gt  0         then         echo -n              echo -e    PID  t  SUM  t  PROGNAME    gt  gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  pid          echo -e    SUM  t  PID  t  PROGNAME    gt  gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  kb          echo -e    PROGNAME  t  SUM  t  PID    gt  gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  name      fi     let OVERALL  OVERALL  SUM     SUM 0 done echo    OVERALL    gt    TMP    SCRIPT NAME  overal  echo  echo  Overall swap used    OVERALL  kB   echo                                             case    SORT   in     name           echo -e  name tkB tpid           echo                                                     cat   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  name sort -r                  kb           echo -e  kB tpid tname           echo                                                     cat   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  kb sort -rh                  pid               echo -e  pid tkB tname           echo                                                     cat   TMP    SCRIPT NAME  pid sort -rh             esac rm -fR    TMP

User · Answer

The best script I found is on this page   http   northernmost org blog find-out-what-is-using-your-swap   Here s one variant of the script and no root needed      bin bash    Get current swap usage for all running processes   Erik Ljungstrom 27 05 2011   Modified by Mikko Rantalainen 2012-08-09   Pipe the output to  sort -nk3  to get sorted output   Modified by Marc Methot 2014-09-18   removed the need for sudo  SUM 0 OVERALL 0 for DIR in  find  proc  -maxdepth 1 -type d -regex    proc  0-9     do     PID  echo  DIR   cut -d   -f 3      PROGNAME  ps -p  PID -o comm --no-headers      for SWAP in  grep VmSwap  DIR status 2 gt  dev null   awk    print  2         do         let SUM  SUM  SWAP     done     if     SUM  gt  0     then         echo  PID  PID swapped  SUM KB   PROGNAME       fi     let OVERALL  OVERALL  SUM     SUM 0 done echo  Overall swap used   OVERALL KB

User · Answer

It s not entirely clear if you mean you want to find the process who has most pages swapped out or process who caused most pages to be swapped out   For the first you may run top and order by swap  press  Op    for the latter you can run vmstat and look for non-zero entries for  so

User · Answer

I suppose you could get a good guess by running top and looking for active processes using a lot of memory  Doing this programatically is harder---just look at the endless debates about the Linux OOM killer heuristics   Swapping is a function of having more memory in active use than is installed  so it is usually hard to blame it on a single process  If it is an ongoing problem  the best solution is to install more memory  or make other systemic changes

User · Answer

I adapted a different script on the web to this long one-liner      date for f in  proc  0-9   status  do     awk   k  1   2  END   if  k  VmSwap     print k  Pid    k  Name    k  VmSwap        f 2 gt  dev null      done   sort -n       Which I then throw into a cronjob and redirect output to a logfile  The information here is the same as accumulating the Swap  entries in the smaps file  but if you want to be sure  you can use     date for m in  proc   smaps do    awk    Swap   s   2  END   if  s  print FILENAME s     m 2 gt  dev null    done   tr -dc    0-9  n   sort -k 1n      The output of this version is in two columns  pid  swap amount   In the above version  the tr strips the non-numeric components  In both cases  the output is sorted numerically by pid

User · Answer

iotop is a very useful tool  It gives live stats of I O and swap usage per process thread  By default it shows per thread but you can do iotop -P to get per process info  This is not available by default  You may have to install via rpm apt

User · Answer

I don t know of any direct answer as how to find exactly what process is using the swap space  however  this link may be helpful  Another good one is over here  Also  use a good tool like htop to see which processes are using a lot of memory and how much swap overall is being used

User · Answer

Gives totals and percentages for process using swap  smem -t -p     Source   https   www cyberciti biz faq linux-which-process-is-using-swap

User · Answer

I did notice this thread is rather old  but if you happen to stumble upon it  as I just did  another answer is  use smem   Here is a link which tells you both how to install it and how to use it   http   www cyberciti biz faq linux-which-process-is-using-swap

User · Answer

It s not entirely clear if you mean you want to find the process who has most pages swapped out or process who caused most pages to be swapped out   For the first you may run top and order by swap  press  Op    for the latter you can run vmstat and look for non-zero entries for  so

User · Answer

You can use Procpath  author here   to simplify parsing of VmSwap from  proc  PID status    procpath record -f stat cmdline status -r 1 -d db sqlite   sqlite3 -column db sqlite      SELECT status name  status vmswap FROM record ORDER BY status vmswap DESC LIMIT 5  Web Content  192136        okular       186872        thunderbird  183692        Web Content  143404        MainThread   86300  You can also plot VmSwap of processes of interest over time like this  Here I m recording my Firefox process tree while opening a couple tens of tabs along with statrting a memory-hungry application to try to cause it to swap  which wasn t convincing for Firefox  but your kilometrage may vary     procpath record -f stat cmdline status -i 1 -d db2 sqlite         children     stat pid    6029      interrupt by Ctrl C   procpath plot -d db2 sqlite -q cpu --custom-value-expr status vmswap     --title  quot CPU usage    vs Swap  kB quot

[linux] How to find out which processes are using swap space in Linux?

Examples related to linux

Examples related to memory

Examples related to swap