Find Top Running Processes by Highest Memory and CPU Usage in Linux

I remember once reading that efficient system administrators are lazy people. The reason is not that they’re not doing their job or wasting their time – it is mostly because they have automated a good deal of their routine tasks. Thus, they don’t have to babysit their servers and can use their time to learn new technologies and always stay at the top of their game.

Part of automating your tasks, is learning how to get a script do what you would have to do yourself otherwise. Continually adding commands to your own knowledge base is just as important.

For that reason, in this article we will share a trick to find out, which processes are consuming lots of Memory and CPU utilization in Linux.

That said, let’s dive in and get started.

Check Top Processes sorted by RAM or CPU Usage in Linux

The following command will show the list of top processes ordered by RAM and CPU use in descendant form (remove the pipeline and head if you want to see the full list):

# ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%mem,%cpu --sort=-%mem | head

Sample Output

PID PPID CMD %MEM %CPU
2591	2113 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox 7.3 43.5
2549 2520 /usr/lib/virtualbox/Virtual 3.4 8.2
2288 1 /home/gacanepa/.dropbox-dis	1.4	0.3
1889 1543	c:TeamViewerTeamViewer.ex	1.0	0.2
2113	1801	/usr/bin/cinnamon 0.9	3.5
2254	2252	python /usr/bin/linuxmint/m	0.3	0.0
2245	1801	nautilus -n 0.3	0.1
1645	1595	/usr/bin/X :0 -audit 0 -aut	0.3	2.5

Brief explanation of above options used in above command.

The -o (or –format) option of ps allows you to specify the output format. A favorite of mine is to show the processes’ PIDs (pid), PPIDs (pid), the name of the executable file associated with the process (cmd), and the RAM and CPU utilization (%mem and %cpu, respectively).

Additionally, I use --sort to sort by either %mem or %cpu. By default, the output will be sorted in ascendant form, but personally I prefer to reverse that order by adding a minus sign in front of the sort criteria.

To add other fields to the output, or change the sort criteria, refer to the OUTPUT FORMAT CONTROL section in the man page of ps command.

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Summary

Monitoring process is one of the numerous tasks of a Linux server system administrator, in this tip, we looked at how you list processes on your system and sort them according to RAM and CPU use in descendant form using the ps utility.