How to determine what process is gobbling up memory?

[Daniel Simard]

Hi All,
we have a system with 4gb of ram. It's 99% used. If i do top, i see 33mb free only, what's the best command or tool i can use to determine what process is gobbling it up?

thanks!

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Daniel:

I'd start with something like this:

# ps -e -o pid,vsz,comm --sort=-vsz

See the manpages for 'ps()' for more information.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Goran Koruga]

Hi.

That is normal for Linux - it will use all available memory. If your applications don't need it, then it will be used for caches etc.

Determining exact amount of RAM used by processes is not trivial, see http://lwn.net/Articles/329785/. ps et all will give you an overwiew, so that's a good start.

Regards,
Goran