I have a process that gradually eats up memory, it's currently at 80.2% and slowing down the linux server
> ps aux | grep SNMPME
root 3129 0.0 80.2 3591752 2480700 ? Sl Feb13 5:04 /opt/nampe/lib/snmpme/SNMPME config/startup.xml
Is there a command I can execute to restart this process and clean up the memory?
Look at the man pages for "renice" but if the application itself is written to be memory consuming, there's not much you can do, besides adding more memory and increasing the swap.
The process starts at bootup, how can I select the process for restart? I want to avoid restarting the whole server.
If it is starting at boot time, then look under /etc/init.d/ for that script and run /etc/init.d/snmpe-scritp.sh restart or stop it first and then start it again.
If you are running RedHat or SuSE and you have this process registered as a service, then you can run: service <service-name> restart.
But this is what I do on my servers:
If a process is taking too much memory or keeps acquiring memory as time goes by, I usually ask the developer or the package maintainer why it is doing this and ask them to debug it and correct the issue.
-GGR