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Find out which processes are using swap

harmlessProcessesdebian, ubuntu
user@server
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

Reads the Name and VmSwap fields from /proc/<PID>/status for each process and sorts by the amount swapped out. free -h only shows that swap is in use; this command shows by whom. A lot of swapped memory for the database or php-fpm is a clear sign of too little RAM or overly generous limits.

Note: Used swap alone is not a problem, as long as vmstat 1 shows little ongoing swapping in the si and so columns.

Also searched as

  • what is using my swap
  • swap is full which process
  • swap usage per process
  • why is the server swapping

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All in Processes

Show memory, swap areas and swappiness

$free -h && swapon --show && cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
harmlessSystem and hardware

Find processes killed by the OOM killer

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

Change swappiness at runtime

#sysctl vm.swappiness=10
cautionSystem and hardware

Find processes whose executable was deleted

#ls -l /proc/*/exe 2>/dev/null | grep '(deleted)'
harmlessSecurity

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