determine total memory used by some user/process Post: 302343472

Sponsored Content

Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers determine total memory used by some user/process Post 302343472 by mglenney on Wednesday 12th of August 2009 02:42:22 PM

08-12-2009

Registered User

Your server looks pretty healthy. Don't be fooled by the 94% you're seeing there. The way that that is reported isn't truly accurate. Buffers and cache are shown as "used memory" but in fact they are available to the system if needed.

For example, if I look at the server I'm working on right now, using top, I see:

Code:

top - 11:23:56 up 32 days, 11:11, 37 users,  load average: 2.79, 4.63, 4.55
Tasks: 365 total,   3 running, 362 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 28.1% us, 11.4% sy,  0.5% ni, 46.2% id, 13.8% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   3984940k total,  3666912k used,   318028k free,     2156k buffers
Swap:  2096472k total,     2136k used,  2094336k free,  2533372k cached

This makes it look like my memory is all used up. (in fact, I'm 2 meg into swap which I don't like. I'll have to look at that.)

But if I look at it using "free":

Code:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       3984940    3934792      50148          0       3348    2628640
-/+ buffers/cache:    1302804    2682136
Swap:      2096472       2136    2094336

You can see, from the bolded line, that if you factor out buffers/cache (which you should) I have about 2.5GB of "free" memory. What's most important when looking at top for memory usage (at least in my opinion) is to look at the amount of swap used. Swap should never be used. If it is it's indicative of a problem. Memory leak, underpowered server, etc.

That being said, if you want to know usage for a user you should use 'ps' and then extract the data from there. You can grep by the user name and then use awk to extract the field you want and perform calculations on it.

mglenney

View Public Profile for mglenney

Find all posts by mglenney

9 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting

1. Filesystems, Disks and Memory

Total Memory/Swap Memory

I need to put a program together to determine the total, available memory and total and available swap on unix machines. I have been searching for weeks and I seem to run into dead ends. Every unix platform I look at has a different way to determine memory info. Any sugggestions or new...

2. HP-UX

How to determine cpu&memory percentage usage per user

Using HP-UX v11 Need to monitor cpu and memory usage, total for system and separately for each user in command-line mode. Found out next ways to monitor total cpu usage under hp-ux: 1) vmstat, also shows free memory 2) sar -M ps -eo user,pcpu - does not work, means 'user-defined format'...

3. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

how can i get The total size of the process in virtual memory om GB or MB

Hello all im using the ps -ef "args vsz" | some.exe but the result is in kb , is there some kind of way or flag ( didnt found in the ps man ) to convert me this data to GB or MG in human readable format ? Thanks

4. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How to accurately determine memory (RAM) information

I'm writing a shell script to display as much useful information on physical and virtual memory availability and usage as possible. I need a CLI tool to print these numbers for me. The utilities that I know to give out some statistics are the following: free top vmstat sysctl In Linux...

5. Solaris

How to find Total and Free Physical Memory and Logical Memory in SOLARIS 9

Hi, Im working on Solaris 9 on SPARC-32 bit running on an Ultra-80, and I have to find out the following:- 1. Total Physical Memory in the system(total RAM). 2. Available Physical Memory(i.e. RAM Usage) 3. Total (Logical) Memory in the system 4. Available (Logical) Memory. I know...

6. Shell Programming and Scripting

Total usage memory by user

Hi, When running top on linux redhat machine , i see that i have 16gb of memory in my machine and about 14.5gb of memory are in use: Mem: 16395780k total, 14970960k used, 1424820k free, 370264k buffers Swap: 4192956k total, 25824k used, 4167132k free, 12029400k cached How can i...

7. Red Hat

Total Memory

Hi, I have a strange issue where the total memory on the server is showing low. At the moment 8 GB of memory is installed and only 3 GB is showing on the shell prompt. I am using the commands free -m and vmstat to check the memory. Please help me out in identifying the issue. With regards...

8. Solaris

T5220 How to determine physical memory installed?

Hi, looking to upgrade memory on a pair of T5220's from 32GB to 64GB. Cannot determine current DIMM size and slots used. i.e. not sure if Qty 16 x 2GB or Qty 8 x 4GB. If there are no empty slots, i need to go with higher density DIMMs and retire exsisting the 2GB prtdiag follows. #...

9. AIX

Process, PID and total memory consumed on AIX.

Hi, Below is the code snippet I use on Linux (Centos) to retrieve the Process Name, PID and memory consumed on Linux (Centos) host:- top -b -n 1 | awk -v date="$tdydate" -v ip="$ip" 'NR>7 {print date","ip","$12,","$1,","$10}' Any idea how the same can be retrieved on an AIX host? This...

LEARN ABOUT OSX

vm_stat

VM_STAT(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						VM_STAT(1)

NAME

     vm_stat -- show Mach virtual memory statistics

SYNOPSIS

     vm_stat [[-c count] interval]

DESCRIPTION

     vm_stat displays Mach virtual memory statistics.  If the optional interval is specified, then vm_stat will display the statistics every
     interval seconds.	In this case, each line of output displays the change in each statistic (an interval count of 1 displays the values per
     second).  However, the first line of output following each banner displays the system-wide totals for each statistic.  If a count is pro-
     vided, the command will terminate after count intervals.  The following values are displayed:

     Pages free
	     the total number of free pages in the system.

     Pages active
	     the total number of pages currently in use and pageable.

     Pages inactive
	     the total number of pages on the inactive list.

     Pages speculative
	     the total number of pages on the speculative list.

     Pages throttled
	     the total number of pages on the throttled list (not wired but not pageable).

     Pages wired down
	     the total number of pages wired down.  That is, pages that cannot be paged out.

     Pages purgeable
	     the total number of purgeable pages.

     Translation faults
	     the number of times the "vm_fault" routine has been called.

     Pages copy-on-write
	     the number of faults that caused a page to be copied (generally caused by copy-on-write faults).

     Pages zero filled
	     the total number of pages that have been zero-filled on demand.

     Pages reactivated
	     the total number of pages that have been moved from the inactive list to the active list (reactivated).

     Pages purged
	     the total number of pages that have been purged.

     File-backed pages
	     the total number of pages that are file-backed (non-swap)

     Anonymous pages
	     the total number of pages that are anonymous

     Uncompressed pages
	     the total number of pages (uncompressed) held within the compressor

     Pages used by VM compressor:
	     the number of pages used to store compressed VM pages.

     Pages decompressed
	     the total number of pages that have been decompressed by the VM compressor.

     Pages compressed
	     the total number of pages that have been compressed by the VM compressor.

     Pageins
	     the total number of requests for pages from a pager (such as the inode pager).

     Pageouts
	     the total number of pages that have been paged out.

     Swapins
	     the total number of compressed pages that have been swapped out to disk.

     Swapouts
	     the total number of compressed pages that have been swapped back in from disk.

     If interval is not specified, then vm_stat displays all accumulated statistics along with the page size.

Mac OS X							  August 13, 1997							  Mac OS X