By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: July 31, 2016
With this site hosted on a virtual server, I'm fighting quite a battle over memory use with the new LAMP architecture in place. As I try to learn more about which applications are using the most memory, I ran into this cool ps
command last night that sorts the ps
output by memory use, specifically by the rss
field:
ps aux --sort:rss
Here's the important output from that command:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND nobody 9518 0.0 0.0 14776 6748 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9427 0.0 0.0 14776 6752 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9428 0.0 0.0 14776 6752 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9475 0.0 0.0 14776 6756 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start root 9380 0.0 0.0 14760 6864 ? Ss Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9426 0.0 0.0 15232 7928 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9447 0.0 0.0 15240 7932 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9471 0.0 0.0 15240 7940 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9394 0.0 0.0 15256 7964 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9392 0.0 0.0 15260 7968 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9472 0.0 0.0 15232 7968 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9390 0.0 0.0 15480 8228 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9430 0.0 0.0 23096 15892 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9474 0.0 0.0 24116 16876 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9429 0.0 0.0 24356 17160 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9391 0.0 0.0 24380 17184 ? S Apr11 0:01 httpd -k start nobody 9516 0.0 0.0 24628 17192 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9515 0.0 0.0 24628 17208 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9414 0.0 0.0 24612 17216 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9393 0.0 0.0 25144 17760 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start nobody 9511 0.0 0.0 25260 17932 ? S Apr11 0:00 httpd -k start mysql 11519 0.0 0.1 129064 25628 ? Sl Apr10 13:56 mysqld --basedir=
I don't yet know where the Apr10 and Apr11 references are coming from -- it's currently August 26th -- but having the output of the ps
command sorted like this is very nice. I'm so used to using the sort command in a pipeline that I often forget that a command like ps
may have its own sorting capability. Again, very nice.