memory being consumed by which process ?

[Kamran Hussain_1]

In trying to determine which process is consuming big chunks of memory on one of the nodes, I need some help figuring out what exactly do the column headings mean for this command: ps gvx | grep dbsnmp

VSZ and RSS

Here is a sample of the output:
1312508 pts/3 I 0:00.02 229291 0 2.53M 960K 0.0 0.0 /oracle/product/9.2.0/bin/dbsnmpwd
1252323 pts/1 S + 0:00.01 0 0 2.28M 856K 0.0 0.0 grep dbsnmp
1312510 pts/3 S 0:13.75 688012 996 2.91G 2.8G 0.0 34.6 /oracle/product/9.2.0/bin/dbsnmp

[Ken Hubnik_2]

Try this command

UNIX95= ps -e -o vsz=Kbytes -o pid,args=Command-Line | sort -rnk1

[Nick Wickens · Accepted solution]

RSS - Resident set size.

The portion of the process that is currently resident in Physical memory (The whole process does not need to be resident)

VSZ - Virtual Set Size

The TOTAL size of the process IF it was loaded into memory.

So if RSS was equal to VSZ then the entire process would be in memory.

[Dave La Mar]

KH -
As stated by Ken the UNIX95 command will nail the culprit.

UNIX95= ps -e -o vsz=Kbytes -o pid,args=Command-Line | sort -rnk1 | head -10

The above is what we use to nail the top ten offenders, worst at top.

This saved us on two occasions last week, in taht we we able to kill the top offender and keep the oracle db from crashing.

Please note that that a kill only was used as a kill -9 may not free the memory in use at the time.

Regards,
dl