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

This very second in time

ps -U $(whoami) -eom pid,pmem,pcpu,comm | head -n4

Continuously updating

watch -n 1 'ps -U $(whoami) -eom pid,pmem,pcpu,comm | head -n4'

I also added a few goodies here you might appreciate (or you might ignore)

-n 1 watch and update every second

-U $(whoami) To show only your processes. $(some command) evaluates now

| head -n4 To only show the header and 3 processes at a time bc often you just need high usage line items

${1-4} says my first argument $1 I want to default to 4, unless I provide it

If you are using a mac you may need to install watch first brew install watch

Alternatively you might use a function

psm(){
    watch -n 1 "ps -eom pid,pmem,pcpu,comm | head -n ${1-4}"
    # EXAMPLES: 
    # psm 
    # psm 10
}