Memory & Swap¶

Use these commands to inspect RAM and swap usage on a Linux system.

List Processes by RAM Usage¶

Show the 20 processes using the most resident memory:

ps aux | awk 'NR > 1 {print $6/1024 " MB\t" $11}' | sort -nr | head -n 20

Find Processes Using Swap¶

Show the five processes with the highest swap usage:

grep VmSwap /proc/*/status 2>/dev/null | sort -nk2 | tail -n5

Clear Cache and Swap¶

As root, flush pending writes, clear filesystem caches, and cycle swap:

sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && swapoff -a && swapon -a

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