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

ps aux --sort '%mem'

from procps' ps (default on Ubuntu 12.04) generates output like:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
...
tomcat7   3658  0.1  3.3 1782792 124692 ?      Sl   10:12   0:25 /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/var/lib/tomcat7/conf/logging.properties -D
root      1284  1.5  3.7 452692 142796 tty7    Ssl+ 10:11   3:19 /usr/bin/X -core :0 -seat seat0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch
ciro      2286  0.3  3.8 1316000 143312 ?      Sl   10:11   0:49 compiz
ciro      5150  0.0  4.4 660620 168488 pts/0   Sl+  11:01   0:08 unicorn_rails worker[1] -p 3000 -E development -c config/unicorn.rb             
ciro      5147  0.0  4.5 660556 170920 pts/0   Sl+  11:01   0:08 unicorn_rails worker[0] -p 3000 -E development -c config/unicorn.rb             
ciro      5142  0.1  6.3 2581944 239408 pts/0  Sl+  11:01   0:17 sidekiq 2.17.8 gitlab [0 of 25 busy]                                                                          
ciro      2386  3.6 16.0 1752740 605372 ?      Sl   10:11   7:38 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox

So here Firefox is the top consumer with 16% of my memory.

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ps aux --sort '%cpu'