When I check free in one of Prod server it showing 70% of memory is being used:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:     164923172  141171860   23751312          0    4555616   20648048
-/+ buffers/cache:  115968196   48954976
Swap:      8388600          0    8388600

But I didn’t find what process is using the memory, I tried the top command and it is showing process using memory only 1.1 and 5.4 %

Is there a way to find out which process is using the memory?

Below are the results of a top command

15085 couchbas  25   0 2784m 2.4g  40m S 183.7  1.5 299597:00 beam.smp
28248 tibco     18   0  124m 100m 3440 S 20.9  0.1   2721:45 tibemsd
15334 couchbas  15   0 9114m 8.6g 3288 S  9.0  5.4  12996:28 memcached
15335 couchbas  18   0  6024  600  468 S  2.0  0.0   1704:54 sigar_port
15319 couchbas  15   0  775m 2516  944 S  0.7  0.0 269:13.41 i386-linux-godu
12167 tibco     16   0 11284 1464  784 R  0.3  0.0   0:00.04 top
12701 root      15   0  451m 427m 2140 S  0.3  0.3  18:25.02 controller
13163 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.3  0.0 289:58.58 vxglm_thread

Best Answer

This will show you the top 10 processes using the most memory

ps aux --sort=-%mem | head

Using top : when you open top , pressing m will sort processes based on memory usage.

In linux everything is a file or process The files you opened will also eat your memory This won't help anybody

lsof will give you all opened files with the size of the file or the file offset in bytes.