Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3031 mails)

[Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00@xxxxxxxxxx>]

James D. Parra wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 February 2008 09:45, James D. Parra wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > How can I find out what process or application is using all of my
> > memory?
>
> The "ps" and "top" commands or KSysGuard or "qps" GUIs can all do this. 
> The System Monitor KDE panel applet ("KTimeMon") is nice for giving an 
> overview of memory allocation (in particular, it's the easiest way to 
> see the breakdown between cache, buffers, used and free memory).
>
> But do you have an actual problem? Is your system behaving badly? Linux 
> manages its RAM to maximize its utilization, which means often there is 
> little or no RAM that is technically "free," since its being used for 
> file system buffers or other caching. But such RAM is readily available 
> to be reassigned to other purposes.
>
> This often alarms those unfamiliar with Linux, expecting that when the 
> so-called "free" memory is low the system is in trouble and imminent 
> failure is likely. That is rarely so.
>
> ~~~~
>
> Thanks Randall. There is no X server running on this system so the gui
> utilities won't help here. When using top it shows the %, but doesn't reveal
> the whole story. I'd like to know which process is using the most bytes, if
> possible.
>
> > From top;
>
> top - 10:38:38 up  1:13,  1 user,  load average: 1.39, 1.35, 1.25
> Tasks:  82 total,   2 running,  80 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu0  : 60.5%us, 38.5%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id,  1.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
> 0.0%st
> Cpu1  :  0.0%us,  0.3%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem:   2059684k total,  1666780k used,   392904k free,      260k buffers
> Swap:  4200988k total,        0k used,  4200988k free,  1266288k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  5439 root      25   0  245m 142m 8260 R   99  7.1  19:08.17 parse-metadata
>   159 root      16   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.28 pdflush
> <snip>
>
> Yes, zmd is hogging all of the cpu after a reboot and I have disabled
> novel-zmd from the system start up, but this is a mail server and clients
> were getting out of memory errors when attempting to connect to the server
> prior to 'parse-metadata' running. The 'out of memory' error was fixed after
> rebooting, although I noticed the memory used creeping up again. What syntax
> for ps will show which app' or process is using most of the RAM?

top.
After top has started running, use ? or h to go to the help page.
You can sort the process list by memory usage.


> Any and all insights are most appreciated.
>
> Thank you,
>
> ~James



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