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Show memory, swap areas and swappiness

harmlessSystem and hardwaredebian, ubuntu
user@server
free -h && swapon --show && cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

free -h shows total, used and available for RAM and swap; the available column is what matters, not free. swapon --show lists swap files and partitions with size and usage, and the last number is the swappiness (default 60). Lower values make the kernel swap out later.

Note: If swapon --show prints nothing, no swap is configured. Which processes are swapped out is covered by the entry on swap usage per process.

Also searched as

  • how much ram is free
  • does the server have swap
  • show swappiness value

Related one-liners

All in System and hardware

Change swappiness at runtime

#sysctl vm.swappiness=10
cautionSystem and hardware

Find out which processes are using swap

$for f in /proc/[0-9]*/status; do awk '/^Name:/ {n=$2} /^VmSwap:/ {print $2, "kB", n}' "$f"; done 2>/dev/null | sort -rn | head -15
harmlessProcesses

Show installed RAM modules and free slots

#dmidecode -t memory | grep -E '^\s+(Size|Type|Speed|Locator|Manufacturer|Part Number):'
harmlessSystem and hardware

Find processes killed by the OOM killer

#journalctl -k --no-pager | grep -iE "out of memory|oom-kill|killed process"
harmlessProcesses

Show processes with the highest RAM usage

$ps -eo pid,user,%mem,rss,cmd --sort=-rss | head -15
harmlessProcesses

Sum up RAM usage per program

$ps -eo rss=,comm= | awk '{a[$2]+=$1} END {for (p in a) printf "%8.1f MB %s\n", a[p]/1024, p}' | sort -rn | head -15
harmlessProcesses

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