Igor Kromin |   Consultant. Coder. Blogger. Tinkerer. Gamer.

Swap space, it's needed at times and can be a real pain at others. It is a necessary evil that has to be put up with however. I've recently had to monitor how much swap space various processes have been using on a Linux system and found that top was the best and quickest option for doing so.

By default however, top does not show swap space details...
top_1.jpg


That's easily remedied by pressing the 'F' (capital f) key followed by 'p' and then enter.
top_2.jpg


This tells top to sort processes using the swap space column and at the same time this also displays the swap space usage. Neat!
top_3.jpg




Of course top will not keep those settings, but by pressing the 'W' (capital w) key it will write a settings file to ~/.toprc so the next time you open top, it will have its output sorted by swap space.
top_4.jpg


By deleting the ~/.toprc all of the original settings will be restored.

-i


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