How to Quickly Identify the Top CPU, Memory, and Virtual Memory Processes on Linux

The article demonstrates practical commands for Linux system monitoring, focusing on extracting the top ten processes that consume the most CPU, memory, and virtual memory using the ps utility combined with head and sort.

1. Top 10 CPU‑consuming processes

Run the following one‑liner to display the header line and then the ten processes with the highest CPU usage (column 3 of ps auxw output):

ps auxw|head -1; ps auxw|sort -rn -k3|head -10

2. Top 10 memory‑consuming processes

To list processes that use the most resident memory (column 4), use:

ps auxw|head -1; ps auxw|sort -rn -k4|head -10

3. Top 10 processes by virtual memory size

For the processes that occupy the most virtual memory (column 5), execute:

ps auxw|head -1; ps auxw|sort -rn -k5|head -10

4. Alternative sorting commands

You can also let ps sort directly: ps auxw --sort=rss – sorts by resident set size (RSS). ps auxw --sort=%cpu – sorts by CPU usage percentage.

5. Meaning of important ps columns

%MEM – percentage of physical memory used by the process.

MAJFL – major page fault count.

VSZ – virtual memory size of the process.

RSS – resident set size, i.e., the actual physical memory used.

TTY – terminal associated with the process.