Classic SysAdmin: Linux 101: 5 Commands for Checking Memory Usage in Linux
This is a classic article written by Jack Wallen from the Linux.com archives. For more great SysAdmin tips and techniques check out our free intro to Linux course.
The Linux operating system includes a plethora of tools, all of which are ready to help you administer your systems. From simple file and directory tools to very complex security commands, there’s not much you can’t do on Linux. And, although regular desktop users may not need to become familiar with these tools at the command line, they’re mandatory for Linux admins. Why? First, you will have to work with a GUI-less Linux server at some point. Second, command-line tools often offer far more power and flexibility than their GUI alternative.
Determining memory usage is a skill you might need should a particular app go rogue and commandeer system memory. When that happens, it’s handy to know you have a variety of tools available to help you troubleshoot. Or, maybe you need to gather information about a Linux swap partition or detailed information about your installed RAM? There are commands for that as well. Let’s dig into the various Linux command-line tools to help you check into system memory usage. These tools aren’t terribly hard to use, and in this article, I’ll show you five different ways to approach the problem.
I’ll be demonstrating on the Ubuntu Server 18.04 platform. You should, however, find all of these commands available on your distribution of choice. Even better, you shouldn’t need to install a single thing (as most of these tools are included).
With that said, let’s get to work.
top
I want to start out with the most obvious tool. The top command provides a dynamic, real-time view of a running system. Included in that system summary is the ability to check memory usage on a per-process basis. That’s very important, as you could easily have multiple iterations of the same command consuming different amounts of memory. Although you won’t find this on a headless server, say you’ve opened Chrome and noticed your system slowing down. Issue the top command to see that Chrome has numerous processes running (one per tab – Figure 1).
Chrome isn’t the only app to show multiple processes. You see the Firefox entry in Figure 1? That’s the primary process for Firefox, whereas the Web Content processes are the open tabs. At the top of the output, you’ll see the system statistics. On my machine (a System76 Leopard Extreme), I have a total of 16GB of RAM available, of which just over 10GB is in use. You can then comb through the list and see what percentage of memory each process is using.
One of the things top is very good for is discovering Process ID (PID) numbers of services that might have gotten out of hand. With those PIDs, you can then set about to troubleshoot (or kill) the offending tasks.
If you want to make top a bit more memory-friendly, issue the command top -o %MEM, which will cause top to sort all processes by memory used (Figure 2).
The top command also gives you a real-time update on how much of your swap space is being used.
free
Sometimes, however, top can be a bit much for your needs. You may only need to see the amount of free and used memory on your system. For that, there is the free command. The free command displays:
- Total amount of free and used physical memory
- Total amount of swap memory in the system
- Buffers and caches used by the kernel
From your terminal window, issue the command free. The output of this command is not in real time. Instead, what you’ll get is an instant snapshot of the free and used memory in that moment (Figure 3).
You can, of course, make free a bit more user-friendly by adding the -m option, like so: free -m. This will report the memory usage in MB (Figure 4).
Of course, if your system is even remotely modern, you’ll want to use the -g option (gigabytes), as in free -g.
If you need memory totals, you can add the t option like so: free -mt. This will simply total the amount of memory in columns (Figure 5).
vmstat
Another very handy tool to have at your disposal is vmstat. This particular command is a one-trick pony that reports virtual memory statistics. The vmstat command will report stats on:
The best way to issue vmstat is by using the -s switch, like vmstat -s. This will report your stats in a single column (which is so much easier to read than the default report). The vmstat command will give you more information than you need (Figure 6), but more is always better (in such cases).
dmidecode
What if you want to find out detailed information about your installed system RAM? For that, you could use the dmidecode command. This particular tool is the DMI table decoder, which dumps a system’s DMI table contents into a human-readable format. If you’re unsure as to what the DMI table is, it’s a means to describe what a system is made of (as well as possible evolutions for a system).
To run the dmidecode command, you do need sudo privileges. So issue the command sudo dmidecode -t 17. The output of the command (Figure 7) can be lengthy, as it displays information for all memory-type devices. So if you don’t have the ability to scroll, you might want to send the output of that command to a file, like so: sudo dmidecode –t 17 > dmi_infoI, or pipe it to the less command, as in sudo dmidecode | less.
/proc/meminfo
You might be asking yourself, “Where do these commands get this information from?”. In some cases, they get it from the /proc/meminfo file. Guess what? You can read that file directly with the command less /proc/meminfo. By using the less command, you can scroll up and down through that lengthy output to find exactly what you need (Figure 8).
One thing you should know about /proc/meminfo: This is not a real file. Instead /pro/meminfo is a virtual file that contains real-time, dynamic information about the system. In particular, you’ll want to check the values for:
- MemTotal
- MemFree
- MemAvailable
- Buffers
- Cached
- SwapCached
- SwapTotal
- SwapFree
If you want to get fancy with /proc/meminfo you can use it in conjunction with the egrep command like so: egrep –color ‘Mem|Cache|Swap’ /proc/meminfo. This will produce an easy to read listing of all entries that contain Mem, Cache, and Swap … with a splash of color (Figure 9).
Keep learning
One of the first things you should do is read the manual pages for each of these commands (so man top, man free, man vmstat, man dmidecode). Starting with the man pages for commands is always a great way to learn so much more about how a tool works on Linux.
Ready to continue your Linux journey? Check out our free intro to Linux course!
5 commands to check memory usage on Linux
On linux, there are commands for almost everything, because the gui might not be always available. When working on servers only shell access is available and everything has to be done from these commands. So today we shall be checking the commands that can be used to check memory usage on a linux system. Memory include RAM and swap.
It is often important to check memory usage and memory used per process on servers so that resources do not fall short and users are able to access the server. For example a website. If you are running a webserver, then the server must have enough memory to serve the visitors to the site. If not, the site would become very slow or even go down when there is a traffic spike, simply because memory would fall short. Its just like what happens on your desktop PC.
1. free command
The free command is the most simple and easy to use command to check memory usage on linux. Here is a quick example
$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7976 6459 1517 0 865 2248 -/+ buffers/cache: 3344 4631 Swap: 1951 0 1951
The m option displays all data in MBs. The total os 7976 MB is the total amount of RAM installed on the system, that is 8GB. The used column shows the amount of RAM that has been used by linux, in this case around 6.4 GB. The output is pretty self explanatory. The catch over here is the cached and buffers column. The second line tells that 4.6 GB is free. This is the free memory in first line added with the buffers and cached amount of memory.
Linux has the habit of caching lots of things for faster performance, so that memory can be freed and used if needed.
The last line is the swap memory, which in this case is lying entirely free.
2. /proc/meminfo
The next way to check memory usage is to read the /proc/meminfo file. Know that the /proc file system does not contain real files. They are rather virtual files that contain dynamic information about the kernel and the system.
$ cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 8167848 kB MemFree: 1409696 kB Buffers: 961452 kB Cached: 2347236 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 3124752 kB Inactive: 2781308 kB Active(anon): 2603376 kB Inactive(anon): 309056 kB Active(file): 521376 kB Inactive(file): 2472252 kB Unevictable: 5864 kB Mlocked: 5880 kB SwapTotal: 1998844 kB SwapFree: 1998844 kB Dirty: 7180 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 2603272 kB Mapped: 788380 kB Shmem: 311596 kB Slab: 200468 kB SReclaimable: 151760 kB SUnreclaim: 48708 kB KernelStack: 6488 kB PageTables: 78592 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 6082768 kB Committed_AS: 9397536 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 420204 kB VmallocChunk: 34359311104 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB AnonHugePages: 0 kB HugePages_Total: 0 HugePages_Free: 0 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 62464 kB DirectMap2M: 8316928 kB
Check the values of MemTotal, MemFree, Buffers, Cached, SwapTotal, SwapFree.
They indicate same values of memory usage as the free command.
3. vmstat
The vmstat command with the s option, lays out the memory usage statistics much like the proc command. Here is an example
$ vmstat -s 8167848 K total memory 7449376 K used memory 3423872 K active memory 3140312 K inactive memory 718472 K free memory 1154464 K buffer memory 2422876 K swap cache 1998844 K total swap 0 K used swap 1998844 K free swap 392650 non-nice user cpu ticks 8073 nice user cpu ticks 83959 system cpu ticks 10448341 idle cpu ticks 91904 IO-wait cpu ticks 0 IRQ cpu ticks 2189 softirq cpu ticks 0 stolen cpu ticks 2042603 pages paged in 2614057 pages paged out 0 pages swapped in 0 pages swapped out 42301605 interrupts 94581566 CPU context switches 1382755972 boot time 8567 forks $
The top few lines indicate total memory, free memory etc and so on.
4. top command
The top command is generally used to check memory and cpu usage per process. However it also reports total memory usage and can be used to monitor the total RAM usage. The header on output has the required information. Here is a sample output
top - 15:20:30 up 6:57, 5 users, load average: 0.64, 0.44, 0.33 Tasks: 265 total, 1 running, 263 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie %Cpu(s): 7.8 us, 2.4 sy, 0.0 ni, 88.9 id, 0.9 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem: 8167848 total, 6642360 used, 1525488 free, 1026876 buffers KiB Swap: 1998844 total, 0 used, 1998844 free, 2138148 cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2986 enlighte 20 0 584m 42m 26m S 14.3 0.5 0:44.27 yakuake 1305 root 20 0 448m 68m 39m S 5.0 0.9 3:33.98 Xorg 7701 enlighte 20 0 424m 17m 10m S 4.0 0.2 0:00.12 kio_thumbnail
Check the KiB Mem and KiB Swap lines on the header. They indicate total, used and free amounts of the memory. The buffer and cache information is present here too, like the free command.
5. htop
Similar to the top command, the htop command also shows memory usage along with various other details.
The header on top shows cpu usage along with RAM and swap usage with the corresponding figures.
RAM Information
To find out hardware information about the installed RAM, use the demidecode command. It reports lots of information about the installed RAM memory.
$ sudo dmidecode -t 17 # dmidecode 2.11 SMBIOS 2.4 present. Handle 0x0015, DMI type 17, 27 bytes Memory Device Array Handle: 0x0014 Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 64 bits Data Width: 64 bits Size: 2048 MB Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: J1MY Bank Locator: CHAN A DIMM 0 Type: DDR2 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 667 MHz Manufacturer: 0xFF00000000000000 Serial Number: 0xFFFFFFFF Asset Tag: Unknown Part Number: 0x524D32474235383443412D36344643FFFFFF
Provided information includes the size (2048MB), type (DDR2) , speed(667 Mhz) etc.
Summary
All the above mentioned commands work from the terminal and do not have a gui. When working on a desktop with a gui, it is much easier to use a GUI tool with graphical output. The most common tools are gnome-system-monitor on gnome and
ksysguard on KDE. Both provide resource usage information about cpu, ram, swap and network bandwidth in a graphical and easy to understand visual output.
A Tech Enthusiast, Blogger, Linux Fan and a Software Developer. Writes about Computer hardware, Linux and Open Source software and coding in Python, Php and Javascript. He can be reached at [email protected] .