I hope some of you have already tried to find this information using one of the below commands. I have used both the commands simultaneously and both gave me the same result in my scenario. This can be easily identified using the top command and the ps command and we will explain how to use these two commands to identify which processes are eating all the resources on your system. In such a scenario, what do you think would be the best approach to identify the processes that are consuming more memory in a Linux machine? Your older Ubuntu version might have cgroups v1, in which case the paths differ - have a look at the docs for that: for cgroups in general, for cgroup v1 memory controller.You may have noticed that sometimes your system consumes too much of memory, which makes your application’s slow or unresponsive.

You can also differentiate between system and user (my current graphical session on my laptop, where I write this, would be in user) by using /sys/fs/cgroup/system.slice/memory.stat/. sys/fs/cgroup/system.slice/rvice/memory.stat, giving you the memory for everything in rvice (the process for this service and everything started by that). If you want that per systemd service, you can use e.g. The most interesting one for you is memory.stat, from which the first line anon $someNumber is probably the most interesting value (giving you bytes of memory in use that are not backed by files and thus cannot be removed from memory anywhere else than swap). In this setup, the metrics systemd_process_resident_memory_bytes, systemd_process_virtual_memory_bytes and systemd_process_virtual_memory_max_bytes would probably be the interesting ones.Ĭgroups (all of this depending on v2) have a file system under /sys/fs/cgroup in which you can query a lot of information. Based on the answer by Halfgaar, doing the simple hacky way but without systemd status | grep somethingįirst I would strongly advise using a monitoring solution of some kind - installing Prometheus systemd-exporter should be quite easy and running Prometheus on any other machine to retrieve the stats should be to - could even be on a device at home/corp for just as long as you debug this issue.

Linux track memory usage of process