Memory check by process in Linux

Written by

Sorin Tudor

in

Hi,

I wanted to post this since it might be useful in some situations. On a Linux machine it seems that one way to check the memory usage by top processes is with ps aux –sort -rss (This means that it’s order by Resistent Set Size)  Once executed it will return an output similar to this:

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
sorin 3673 0.6 27.3 3626020 563964 pts/1 Sl+ 02:24 1:09 java -Xmx1G -Xms1G -server -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=20 -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=35 -XX:+Disa
sorin 1708 2.0 9.2 1835288 189692 ? Sl 02:11 3:56 /usr/bin/gnome-shell
sorin 1967 0.6 8.0 1642280 166160 ? Sl 02:12 1:11 firefox-esr
sorin 3413 0.1 3.7 2000252 77016 pts/0 Sl+ 02:21 0:19 java -Xmx512M -Xms512M -server -XX:+UseG1GC -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=20 -XX:InitiatingHeapOccupancyPercent=35 -XX:+
root 576 0.5 2.6 263688 54172 tty7 Ssl+ 02:11 1:07 /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -novtswitch -background none -noreset -verbose 3 -auth /var/run/gdm3/auth-for-Debian-gdm-Bu1jB
sorin 1813 0.0 2.2 1175504 47196 ? Sl 02:11 0:00 /usr/lib/evolution/evolution-calendar-factory
root 486 0.1 1.2 377568 26584 ? Ssl 02:11 0:21 /usr/bin/dockerd -H fd://

If you want to get more detail of a PID status you can go to /proc/[pid]/status and you can find a lot of other informations. For example the top process on my Linux machine has the following header:

sorin@debian:/proc/3673$ cat status
Name: java
State: S (sleeping)
Tgid: 3673
Ngid: 0
Pid: 3673
PPid: 3660
TracerPid: 0
Uid: 1000 1000 1000 1000
Gid: 1000 1000 1000 1000
FDSize: 256
Groups: 24 25 29 30 44 46 108 111 116 1000
VmPeak: 3626024 kB
VmSize: 3626020 kB

As you can see, the RSS is the same as VmSize.

Cheers!

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