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How to find which process is eating RAM memory in Linux

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Dec 9, 2010

“If you are running out of RAM on your Linux system, you will
want to find the culprit in order to solve the problem, either by
reconfiguring the RAM-hungry application or by stopping it.

“We’ll use ps, awk, head and sort with a pipe, to find out which
application is consuming our RAM

“List running processes ordered by RAM usage

ps aux | awk ‘{print $2, $4, $11}’ | sort -k2r | head -n 20


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Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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