Question
Which Process is taking all the memory?
- Posted on January 29, 2020
- Monitoring
Asked by Gary Williams
Hi Guys,
Twice today my server memory usage has climbed from its stable 35% upto 92%. The first instance corrected itself, the second time I power cycled the droplet. How can I determine which process is hogging all this memory?
Cheers
Gary
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Hello, @garywilliams
You can ssh to your droplet and use either
toporhtopto see which processes is consuming most of the droplet’s memory. In order to see the memory usage in htop, once you’ve executed the htop command use Shift + M or just click the MEM% sign with the mouse (htop can be navigated using the mouse button).You can also use a command like this one to show the processes memory in megabytes and the process path, but generally htop and top are my favorites.
Let me know how it goes.
Regards, Alex
Hi Alex,
Thanks! I have now tried atop, top and htop. I didn’t know these existed. Fascinating to watch the server operation in real time, not that it means too much to me at the moment. It turns out the the ‘mercure’ module was the culprit. Installing an upgrade sorted that out.
I am alway impressed by smart guys like you who can rattle off lines of code like “ps auk …”
I’m now reading through tutorials and making a list of useful commands and code snippets.
Many thanks for your help.
Cheers
Gary