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

you can specify which column to sort by, with following steps:

steps:
* top
* shift + F
* select a column from the list
    e.g. n means sort by memory,
* press enter
* ok