How to see top processes sorted by actual memory usage?

Question

I have a server with 12G of memory. A fragment of top is shown below:

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                              


        

Answer 1

First you should read an explanation on the output of free. Bottom line: you have at least 10.7 GB of memory readily usable by processes.

Then you should define what "memory usage" is for a process (it's not easy or unambiguous, trust me).

Then we might be able to help more :-)