Sometimes it is not comfortable to see meminfo in kilobytes when you have several gigs of RAM. In Linux, it looks like:
And here is how it looks in Mac OS X:
Is there a way to display meminfo in Linux top in terabytes, gigabytes and megabytes?
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Sign up to join this communityWhen in top, typing capital "E" cycles through different memory units (KiB, MiB, GiB, etc., which are different from kB, MB and GB) in the total memory info:
While lower-case "e" does the same individual process lines:
From the manpage:
2c. MEMORY Usage
This portion consists of two lines which may express values in kibibytes
(KiB) through exbibytes (EiB) depending on the scaling factor enforced
with the 'E' interactive command.
Version Information: top -version
: procps-ng version 3.3.9
System: CentOS 7
There is a command-line option which does that:
-M : Detect memory units
Show memory units (k/M/G) and display floating point values in the
memory summary.
So it is sufficient to run top like that:
top -M
If -M
does not work you can press E
while already in top.
From man top
(procps-ng version 3.3.9):
E :Extend-Memory-Scale in Summary Area With this command you can cycle through the available summary area memory scaling which ranges from KiB (kibibytes or 1,024 bytes) through EiB (exbibytes or 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes).
If you see a '+' between a displayed number and the following label, it means that top was forced to truncate some portion of that number. By raising the scaling factor, such truncation can be avoided.
You can also use htop
. It's much cooler than top
.
If you are using Debian or one of its derivatives, then you can install it using sudo apt-get install htop
.
Edit: Here is a screenshot with a better color scheme:
htop
looks better with either a white or a black background. Your screenshot color scheme is less than optimal.
F2
.
Nov 28, 2016 at 20:09
alias top='htop --no-color'
so I can type 'top' and get a reasonable replacement for top without the horrible color scheme.
Jul 12, 2019 at 18:18
top -M
doesn't work on any of the Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu distros to my knowledge. I just tried it and it's not in the procps-ng
package that provides top
. There are many implementations of top
so one needs to pay special attention to which they use.
In general it's best to use free
with switching to get the amount of memory free on Linux.
You might have noticed that on CentOS 5 & 6 as well as RHEL 5 & 6 that top -M
appears to work. This is because those distros ship with the original version of procps
. The project was forked and there is now another project procps-ng
.
Some of the details as to why there was a fork, from the Fedora Project's page.
excerpt
Old (legacy) procps tools had no updates for several years and that led to a massive code split caused by a local-only application of distribution specific patches, which were not merged upstream. The project became hardly maintainable since some of the newly written patches were incompatible with sources maintained by other distributors. A similar incompatibility could be noticed in the applications behavior and their command line switches. This inevitable update can be understood as an effort to unify the procps tools across all Linux distributions.
So to be clear, the forked project, procps-ng
is what Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and other distros are using, the legacy project, which does support top -M
is still in use of several of the longer term releases that don't keep up with the latest and greatest.
NOTE: I downloaded the latest version of procps-ng
, "procps-ng version 3.3.9.1-14ef" and it too was lacking the -M
switch.
$ ./top/top -version
procps-ng version 3.3.9.1-14ef
Usage:
lt-top -hv | -bcHiOSs -d secs -n max -u|U user -p pid(s) -o field -w [cols]
In running free
with switches, you can see the most likely reason as to why the lack of units feature is missing from procps-ng
's implementation of top
.
$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7782 6506 1276 0 504 1726
-/+ buffers/cache: 4274 3507
Swap: 7823 1429 6394
[saml@greeneggs ~]$ free -k
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7969492 6663180 1306312 0 516948 1764780
-/+ buffers/cache: 4381452 3588040
Swap: 8011772 1463456 6548316
Rounding becomes problematic, so I believe, procps
's implementation avoids the issue by not offering the ability.
Does an OK job of showing aggregate memory usage.
In my opinion a better tool for looking at memory.
Another useful tool is nmon
for looking at system performance.
-M
switch, CentOS 5.8, also has this switch, "procps version 3.2.7". However Fedora 19 has "procps-ng version 3.3.8" which doesn't support the -M
switch.
You can press the following keys:
You can use the command line option E
to specify the memory scaling, for example in gigabytes:
$ top -E g
From man top
:
-E :Extend-Memory-Scaling as: -E k | m | g | t | p | e
Instructs top to force summary area memory to be scaled as:
k - kibibytes
m - mebibytes
g - gibibytes
t - tebibytes
p - pebibytes
e - exbibytes
Later this can be changed with the `E' command toggle.
The -e
option can be used with the same options to change the values in the task list.
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 and RHEL 9
top
to save your current settings as defaults. So start up with, e.g. top -Eg -eg -o%MEM
and press W. Next time you can just run top
with settings saved.
So the quick answer : depending on your linux distro, try either :
top -M
OR, after starting top, type capital E (then W to write the config).
One of those should work for nearly everybody (except Solaris, of course, where you'd be lucky to have top at all).
bonus tip : every time you start a top instance on a new install, type ExyzW to save colours and highlighting and units - what a relief!
On RHEL7 top shift + e or CspsLK ON. You need " E " capital alphabet.
You will get in MiB, Gib, TiB, PiB, EiB. All these you can access.
And also you can you htop command which should be downlaoded and installed on rpm base system.
Thank you. Sagar Dalvi
Let's do some magic one liners so that you can alias what you want and never need to remember which letter to hit when in top to get what you want.
The want is to display top like output but having RSS in MBs and I'm adding also a desire to filter out only the program I want.
In the following examples we will use python
as the target processes we want to watch. We will, of course, use perl
to do that ;)
a. Without headers (if you memorizedps
's headers)
One time:
ps auxc | grep python | perl -plae '$F[5]=sprintf q[%0.3fMB],$F[5]/2**10; $_=qq[@F]' | column -t
Using watch
to emulate top, refreshing every 0.5 sec
watch -n 0.5 $'ps auxc | grep python | perl -plae \'$F[5]=sprintf q[%0.3fMB],$F[5]/2**10; $_=qq[@F]\' | column -t'
Make an alias (bash 4.4 or higher)
alias watch-python=$'watch -n 0.5 \'ps auxc | grep python | perl -plae "\$F[5]=sprintf q[%0.3fMB],\$F[5]/2**10; \$_=qq[@F]" | column -t | grep python\''
b. With headers (for the rest of us):
One time:
(ps auxc | head -1; ps auxc | grep python | perl -plae '$F[5]=sprintf q[%0.3fMB],$F[5]/2**10; $_=qq[@F]') | column -t
Using watch
to emulate top, refreshing every 0.5 sec:
watch -n 0.5 $'(ps auxc | head -1; ps auxc | grep python | perl -plae \'$F[5]=sprintf q[%0.3fMB],$F[5]/2**10; $_=qq[@F]\') | column -t'
Make an alias (bash 4.4 or higher)
alias watch-python=$'watch -n 0.5 \'(ps auxc | head -1; ps auxc | grep python | perl -plae "\$F[5]=sprintf q[%0.3fMB],\$F[5]/2**10; \$_=qq[@F]") | column -t\''
Notes:
| grep python
if you want all processes2**10
with 2**20
and MB
with GB
if you want GBs instead of MBspython
with another string that your program starts with. You can inspect the output of ps auxc
to see what's the 10th (0-indexed) column says in case you get no output. a python program could be running with the name of the python script and not python itself for example, so make sure to use the name of the script instead.%0.3f
with %0.2f
if you want only 2 decimals for MBswatch -n 0.5
with watch -n 3
if you want to refresh every 3 secondsps
flags in these examples the count of columns may change and the scripts may break.
top -M
to display the usage in MB. If you only want to monitor the memory usage, you can use rather usehtop
. Not sure of any other option.free -m
, or betterfree -h
instead.E
until it shows the memory cumulative you're looking for, then hitW
to write that configuration to disk.