Easy command line way to check memory usage

[Jeanine Kone]

I am looking for the command line way to check memory usage (i.e. how much is used and how much is free).

I know that I can see this in Glance, but I want the actual command so that I can put in ina script and run it from cron once per hour for a few weeks.

I have looked at sar, but it does not seem to have real memery usage info, just swap space and paging. I look at pstat also, but it seems way to complex for my needs.

Any simple, one line solutions???

Thanks, Jeanine

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Jeanine,

Try,

vmstat -n 1 10

top
Check out RSS. This is the Real memory (resident set) size of the process, in 1024 byte units.

Hope this helps.

Regards

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Jeanine,

You can also try,

UNIX95= ps -e -o "user,vsz,pid,ppid,args"

here vsz -> Size in KB of the core image of the process.

you can sort the above output too,

UNIX95= ps -e -o "user,vsz,pid,ppid,args" |sort -rkn2 |more

Hope this helps.

Regds

[S.K. Chan]

You can also use this method to capture the glance screen (just the memory report screen)..

# glance -m -j 5 -iterations 2 -f /tmp/output > /dev/null

-m = just memory screen
-j 5 = ev 5 sec
-iterations 2 = # iterations
-f /tmp/output = output to file /tmp/output

Direct all to null so that it does not show up in std output.

[hpuxrox]

Hello,

I like to use

top -h -d 1

and look at Memory from there.


Thanks,

-Yates

[hari jayaram_1]

Hi,

As Sanjay suggested vmstat is fine. However if you have meassureware and perf view installed please let me know and I can suggest a method where you do not need to have a cron job and get the data.

Thanks

Regards

Hari

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi:

Since you have Glance, let's use the mwaget command-line interface.

I assume that /opt/perf/bin is in your PATH.

e.g.
mwaget -metric "SCOPE:(GLOBAL):GBL_MEM_UTIL"
(Percentage global memory utilization during the sampling interval.)

mwaget -metric "SCOPE:(GLOBAL):GBL_MEM_FREE_UTIL"
(Percentage global memory free during the sampling interval.)

[Mladen Despic · Accepted solution]

If you save the following to a file in your current directory (let's call it mem.syntax):

PRINT "System Memory: ", gbl_mem_sys
PRINT "Buffer Cache: ", gbl_mem_cache
PRINT "User Memory: ", gbl_mem_user
PRINT "Free Memory: ", gbl_mem_free
PRINT "-------------------------------"
PRINT "Total Physical Memory: ", gbl_mem_phys

then you can get a nice memory usage summary by running:

glance -adviser_only -syntax mem.syntax -j 1 -iterations 2 2>/dev/null | tail -6

The metrics listed above (gbl_mem_xxxx) can also be used with Clay's suggestion.

Other Measureware and Glance metrics are listed in
/opt/perf/paperdocs/mwa/C/metrics.txt

and

/opt/perf/paperdocs/gp/C/metrics.txt

[Mladen Despic]

Jeanine,

You can also use Glance in "adviser only" mode to log any performance metrics every hour for 7 days.

For example, with the same mem.syntax file in your current directory, run:

nohup glance -adviser_only -syntax mem.syntax -j 3600 -iterations 168 -f glance.out &

In this case I would also include the timestamp header in mem.syntax:

PRINT " ", gbl_statdate, " ", gbl_stattime
PRINT "------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Jeanine


If you want something like this :
Memory Stat total used avail %used
physical 32764.0 24296.4 8467.6 74%
active virtual 16899.8 10480.4 6419.4 62%
active real 18039.3 10747.2 7292.1 60%
memory swap 26522.5 19504.4 7018.1 74%
device swap 3332.0 3332.0 0.0 100%

you may like to compile a simple c program attached whihc i got from these forums too . Just do a cc filename and you will get a exe which can be run from the command line.


Manoj Srivastava

[Jeanine Kone]

Thanks everybody for the responses - I am going to try them out today and then assign your points. I got a lot of good answers!!

Jeanine

[Dinesh Ramaswamy]

Hi Jeanine,
Please try this one-liner...
grep Physical /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

All the best...
Regards,
Dinesh Ramaswamy

[harry d brown jr]

You want to take a complex issue (memory usage in unix) and reduce it to a "simple" one line command?

answer: write yourself a program/script that will output such.

live free or die
harry

[Jeanine Kone]

Ok guys, this question was asked and answered back in may - please no more responses!