How can I display the memory usage of each process if i do a 'ps -ef'

Question

In linux, how can I display memory usage of each process if i do a 'ps -ef'? I would like to the 'virtual memory', 'res memory', 'shared memory' of each progress. I can get that via 'top', but I want the same info in 'ps -ef ' so that I can pipe the output to 'grep {my process name}'.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Obtaining memory usage through ps is pretty unreliable. If you have a newer kernel it should support /proc/pid#/smaps which gives you some detailed information on each processes memory usage. Below is a pretty dirty and quick script to loop through each process that is open and grab the Size, Rss, Pss and Shared Clean/Dirty usage. Hopefully it can be useful in some kind of way.

#!/bin/bash

for pid in $(ps -ef | awk '{print $2}'); do
    if [ -f /proc/$pid/smaps ]; then
            echo "* Mem usage for PID $pid"
            echo "-- Size:"
            cat /proc/$pid/smaps | grep -m 1 -e ^Size: | awk '{print $2}'
            echo "-- Rss:"
            cat /proc/$pid/smaps | grep -m 1 -e ^Rss: | awk '{print $2}'
            echo "-- Pss:"
            cat /proc/$pid/smaps | grep -m 1 -e ^Pss: | awk '{print $2}'
            echo "Shared Clean"
            cat /proc/$pid/smaps | grep -m 1 -e '^Shared_Clean:' | awk '{print $2}'
            echo "Shared Dirty"
            cat /proc/$pid/smaps | grep -m 1 -e '^Shared Dirty:' | awk '{print $2}'
    fi
done

Answer 2

ps ef -o command,vsize,rss,%mem,size

I could not find an option for shared memory, but I did find options for % of total physical memory and the amount of swapspace that would be needed to swap out the process. This and much more is documented in the man page for ps.

Answer 3

you can use

top -n 1

Answer 4

List processes by memory usage

ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n