Which process is eating away the memory

which process is using up your memory using ps, awk, sort

The following command lists all the process sorted based on the used memory size.

$ ps aux | awk '{if ($5 != 0 ) print $2,$5,$6,$11}' | sort -k2n

PID VSZ RSS COMMAND

3823 3788 484 /sbin/mingetty

3827 3788 484 /sbin/mingetty

3830 3788 484 /sbin/mingetty

3833 3788 488 /sbin/mingetty

3834 3788 484 /sbin/mingetty

3873 3788 484 /sbin/mingetty

2173 3796 568 /usr/sbin/acpid

1835 3800 428 klogd

1832 5904 596 syslogd

2054 5932 540 /usr/sbin/sdpd

2281 6448 360 gpm

The above command lists the PID, Used virutal memory size, Used resident set-size and process command. The output is sorted on VSZ.

While debugging performance issues, use this command to find out which process is using up the memory.

Find out Top 10 Largest File or Directory Using du, sort and head

du command shows summarized disk usage for each file and directory of a given location (/var/log/*). The output of a sort command is reversely sorted based on the size.

# du -sk /var/log/* | sort -r -n | head -10

1796    /var/log/audit

1200    /var/log/sa

612     /var/log/anaconda.log

512     /var/log/wtmp

456     /var/log/messages.4

92      /var/log/messages.2

76      /var/log/scrollkeeper.log

72      /var/log/secure

56      /var/log/cups

48      /var/log/messages.1