Memory usage based sorting using top

[Tapan Shah]

Hi All,

By default "top" command gives the process list sorted (descending) on CPU usage. I want to know if there is any way to make the tool print the process list sorted on memory usage.

If not using top, can I use any other command/utility to get this required output?

Is it possible to have all the statistics (like CPU usage and Mem. usage) for a single process using top?

Thanks for any help in this.

Regards,
Tapan.

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Tapan,

You can use UNIX95 variable with ps.

UNIX95= ps -efH


-Arun

[Arunvijai_4 · Accepted solution]

Hi Tapan,

Sorry for the second post, check this thread and take a look at Geoff's script

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=838754

-Arun

[Muthukumar_5]

Use like,

UNIX95=1 ps -ef -o pid,sz,vsz,comm

sz and vsz will give memory related informations.

You can use glance tool for accurate informations.

--
Muthu

[Matthew Ghofrani]

Try this. It sorts all ps items with highest memory listed first. The memory is in page units. In my system every page is 4K.

#!/usr/bin/sh
# *******
ps -elf|awk '{print $10, $3, $4, $15, 16}'|sort -nr|more
exit

[Bill Hassell]

The man page for top tells all -- no option for memory usage. top is designed to show the top processes using CPU cycles. You can use ps to report memory usage but if you search through these Forums, you'll see many requests for this information with cautions that trying to figure out all memory usage is a lot more complicated. If you just want to see the largest processes, you can use this command:

UNIX95=1 ps -e -o vsz,pid,ppid,args | sort -rn | head -20

Otherwise, be aware that programs share a number of memory areas such as libraries, text, data (shared memory segmants) and the buffer cache.