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4

I'm looking for somthing like top is to CPU usage. Is there a command line argument for top that does this? Currently, my memory is so full that even 'man top' fails with out of memory :)

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1  
+1 great question!!! thank you! – mongotop May 9 at 18:49

5 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

From inside top you can try the following:

  • Press SHIFT+f
  • Press the Letter corresponding to %MEM
  • Press ENTER

You might also try:

$ ps -eo pmem,pcpu,vsize,pid,cmd | sort -k 1 -nr | head -5

This will give the top 5 processes by memory usage.

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Under Linux, simply press M to sort by physical memory usage (RES column). Under *BSD, run top -o res or top -o size. But htop is a lot nicer and doesn't even consume more memory than top (however it's not part of the basic toolset so you might not have it installed). – Gilles Dec 19 '10 at 13:38
up vote 6 down vote

If you have it installed I like htop once launching it you can press f6, down arrow (to MEM%), enter to sort by memory.

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up vote 3 down vote

Once top starts, press F to switch to the sort field screen. Choose one of the fields listed by pressing the key listed on the left; you probably want N for MEM%

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If you want MEM%, pressing 'M' does the same stated above. 'c' adds command line parameters to the process list, may be informative for your problem. – wag Dec 19 '10 at 8:46
@wag Oh, handy. – Michael Mrozek♦ Dec 19 '10 at 9:25
up vote 2 down vote

In Solaris the command you would need is:

prstat -a -s size

This will list all processes in order of descending process image size. Note that the latter is based on memory committed to the process by the OS, not its resident physical memory usage.

There are supposedly versions of "top" available for Solaris, but these are not part of the standard installation.

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up vote 1 down vote

One nice alternative to top is htop. Check it, it is much more user friendly than regular top.

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