proc/meminfoĮven though it might seem like we are consulting a file, in reality whatever in contained inside “proc” folder is just virtual files that display information directly from kernel. You can see the used memory out of the available memory beside the Mem line on the top left section. It is a bit more graphical and shows information a little more friendlier than top, however, it is also a real time visualization: htop running Htop is very similar in functionality to the top command, yet it’s slightly different.

You can press Shift+M keys to sort top command on memory usage. It also gives you a real time visualization of the current running processes and the amount each one is consuming. In the header you will notice how it reports the total amount of memory, the amount used and the amount free, and this for both regular (RAM) memory and SWAP memory as well. Here is a screenshot of how it looks: top command running It gives the information about memory and CPU. This is probably one of the most common and the one that I use at first. You can see that the free command provides only the necessary info at a glance. RAM, the swap usage and the buffer used by the Linux kernel.Īll you have to do is to type free in the terminal and hit enter: You can see the free and used physical memory i.e. It shows the amount of free and used memory on your Linux system.

The free command in Linux has the simplest output. In this article, we will cover how to check memory in different ways and explain a little bit how each of the command lines for this purpose works. 5 Commands to check memory usage in Linux

If you want to check disk space in Linux, you use disk related commands. In other words, if you want to check RAM usage in Linux, you use the memory related commands. Note: Memory, physical memory terms are used for RAM (which is a more popular term).

We have already showed you how to check CPU info in Linux, today, I am going to show how to check memory in Linux. When using any Linux distribution, it is important as a SysAdmin to know how to visualize your available and used resources, such as memory, CPU, disk space, etc.

Linux track memory usage of process