How to find top 10 memory used process in AIX by topas commands

UNIX AIX
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How to find top 10 memory used process in AIX by topas commands

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Welcome!

Try the commands

topas -P
svmon -P

In my Unix experience the resident memory size matters most, more than the full/virtual/paged size.
AIX might further divide the resident memory into DATA RES and TEXT RES, then I guess one should sum 'em up.

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Thank you for the reply.
When I tried the command topas -P, not seeing %mem column. Getting below columns

                                    DATA  TEXT  PAGE                  PGFAULTS
USER          PID     PPID PRI  NI   RES   RES SPACE    TIME  CPU%   I/O   OTH COMMAND

Please guide me for sorting based on top MEM utilization processes

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@avinashmy
does man topas help in any way?

1 Like
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Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I wanted to write a script which has top 10 memory and CPU utilization from topas command. I tried man topas but didnot get much information. Please help me here

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I would do it with the ps command.
After reading
man ps
especially the section with -o format
I assembled the following command

ps -e -o pid,ppid,rss,vsz,pcpu,user,args

In older AIX, you might need to replace vsz by size
In a shell script you can post-process it like this:

ps -e -o pid,ppid,rss,vsz,pcpu,user,args |
{
  IFS= read -r header; printf "%s\n" "$header"
  sort -n -k3,3 -k5,5 -k4,4
}

I.e. it sorts numerically, primarily on field 3 (rss, resident memory), then field 5 (pcpu, percent cpu), then field 4(vsz, virtual memory).
You can pipe the sort output to tail, or run it with -r and pipe to head.

2 Likes
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Hi MadeInGermany,
Thanks a lot for the suggestion. It worked for me. Kindly guide me on sorting based on CPU utilization process (top 10 process)

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sort -r (reverse), primarily on field 5, and piped to head:
sort -r -n -k5,5 -k3,3 -k4,4 | head

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Thank you for the quick reply and help

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Please help me to understand what is the difference between
ps -ef -o pid,ppid,rss,vsz,pcpu,user,args and ps -e -o pid,ppid,rss,vsz,pcpu,user,args

i.e ps -e -o & ps -ef -o

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ps -f is a fixed format.
ps -o format is a custom format.
Both are standard in POSIX (portable).
Together the behavior is undefined in POSIX. On some Unix it might give an error. Since I don't have an AIX system I don't know what happens there. I simply avoid it. Additional fields I put in the -o format. See
man ps
args should be the last field because it can consist of fields itself.

1 Like
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Got it. Thank you :slight_smile:

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