Order Linux processes by memory usage

This one is more for me actually. We have some issues with one puppet instance on which the processes fail, and i wanted to see if there is any way to order them by memory usage.

So i searched the net and found this link https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/92493/sorting-down-processes-by-memory-usage

The command is like

ps aux --sort -rss | head -10

And it provides you with following output, at least in my case

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
puppet    6327 70.1 25.5 3585952 1034532 ?     Sl   06:53   7:33 /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java -XX:OnOutOfMemoryError=kill -9 %p -Djava.security.egd=/dev/urandom -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jolokia-jvm-agent.jar=port=8778 -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -cp /opt/puppetlabs/server/apps/puppetserver/puppet-server-release.jar clojure.main -m puppetlabs.trapperkeeper.main --config /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/conf.d -b /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/bootstrap.cfg
jenkins   6776  9.6 16.6 4648236 671980 ?      Sl   06:55   0:51 /usr/bin/java -Djava.awt.headless=true -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jolokia-jvm-agent.jar=port=8780 -Xms1024m -Xmx1024m -jar /usr/share/jenkins/jenkins.war --webroot=/var/cache/jenkins/war --httpPort=8080 --httpListenAddress=127.0.0.1
puppetdb  5987 16.8 11.7 3845896 474164 ?      Sl   06:52   2:01 /usr/bin/java -XX:OnOutOfMemoryError=kill -9 %p -Djava.security.egd=/dev/urandom -Xmx192m -javaagent:/usr/share/java/jolokia-jvm-agent.jar=port=8779 -cp /opt/puppetlabs/server/apps/puppetdb/puppetdb.jar clojure.main -m puppetlabs.puppetdb.main --config /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/conf.d -b /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/bootstrap.cfg
postgres  1458  0.0  2.1 249512 88656 ?        Ss   Nov21   3:10 postgres: checkpointer process                                                                                              
postgres  6206  0.0  1.4 253448 57984 ?        Ss   06:53   0:00 postgres: puppetdb puppetdb 127.0.0.1(36882) idle                                                                           
postgres  6209  0.0  0.7 252580 29820 ?        Ss   06:53   0:00 postgres: puppetdb puppetdb 127.0.0.1(36886) idle                                                                           
postgres  6210  0.0  0.5 254892 22440 ?        Ss   06:53   0:00 postgres: puppetdb puppetdb 127.0.0.1(36888) idle                                                                           
postgres  6213  0.0  0.5 254320 21416 ?        Ss   06:53   0:00 postgres: puppetdb puppetdb 127.0.0.1(36894) idle                                                                           
postgres  6205  0.0  0.5 253524 20324 ?        Ss   06:53   0:00 postgres: puppetdb puppetdb 127.0.0.1(36878) idle

As you can probably see, the components are taking slowly but surely more and more memory and since the machine has only 4GB allocated it will probably crash again.

If this happens, i will manually increase the memory with another 2GB and see where we will go from there.

Cheers!