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Show processes with the highest RAM usage

harmlessProcessesdebian, ubuntu
user@server
ps -eo pid,user,%mem,rss,cmd --sort=-rss | head -15

Sorts all processes by actually used memory (RSS, in KiB) and shows the largest. The %MEM column puts that in relation to total RAM. Useful before the OOM killer strikes or when the server starts swapping.

Note: With many identical processes (php-fpm, apache2), shared memory is counted for each of them, so the sum of RSS values is larger than the real usage.

Also searched as

  • which process uses so much ram
  • memory is full linux
  • find memory hogs
  • top processes by memory

Related one-liners

All in Processes

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

Show running lsphp processes with memory usage

$ps -eo pid,user,%cpu,rss,etime,cmd --sort=-rss | grep -E "[l]sphp"
harmlessLiteSpeed

Count processes per user

$ps -eo user= | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
harmlessProcesses

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

Find processes killed by the OOM killer

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

Find zombie processes and their parent processes

$ps -eo pid,ppid,stat,cmd | awk 'NR == 1 || $3 ~ /^Z/'
harmlessProcesses

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