Top ten (or whatever) memory utilizing processes (with children aggregate)

ps axo rss,comm,pid | awk '{ proc_list[$2]++; proc_list[$2 "," 1] += $1; } END { for (proc in proc_list) { printf("%d\t%s\n", proc_list[proc "," 1],proc); }}' | sort -n | tail -n 10

This command loops over all of the processes in a system and creates an associative array in awk with the process name as the key and the sum of the RSS as the value. The associative array has the effect of summing a parent process and all of it's children. It then prints the top ten processes sorted by size.

Sample Output

2472    NetworkManager
3624    getty
3888    hald
3948    nm-system-setti
3968    gdm
4012    bash
6384    sshd
14348   apache2
20560   console-kit-dae
22104   mysqld

By: d34dh0r53

2010-03-03 16:41:05

awk ps sort tail

1 Alternatives + Submit Alt

Top ten (or whatever) memory utilizing processes (with children aggregate) - Can be done without the multi-dimensional array
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1

ps axo rss,comm,pid | awk '{ proc_list[$2] += $1; } END { for (proc in proc_list) { printf("%d\t%s\n", proc_list[proc],proc); }}' | sort -n | tail -n 10

bwm71 · 2010-03-03 16:51:48 4

What Others Think

Great command. Just wondering if it would be possible to enter this into an alias, or a one liner script.. I got awk syntax errors trying to do so with both commands above - Pasted below but not sure how well it will get formatted. awk: { proc_list[on]++; proc_list[on , 1] += rmstar; } END { for (proc in proc_list) { printf(%dt%sn, proc_list[proc , 1],proc); }} awk: ^ syntax error awk: { proc_list[on]++; proc_list[on , 1] += rmstar; } END { for (proc in proc_list) { printf(%dt%sn, proc_list[proc , 1],proc); }} awk: ^ syntax error

stuntkiwi · 775 weeks and 6 days ago

You may be able to do it with an alias command, but you'll need to escape the quotes.

d34dh0r53 · 775 weeks and 5 days ago

rahimhh21 · 124 weeks ago

Perfecthomepugs · 115 weeks and 2 days ago

pugpuppies95 · 77 weeks and 3 days ago

yeneba6574 · 32 weeks and 3 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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