how do i find which process is leaking memory [clo

Question

I have a system (Ubuntu) with many processes and one (or more) have a memory leak. Is there a good way to find the process that has the leak? Some of the process are JVMs, some are not. Some are home grown some are open source.

Answer 1

if the program leaks over a long time, top might not be practical. I would write a simple shell scripts that appends the result of "ps aux" to a file every X seconds, depending on how long it takes to leak significant amounts of memory. Something like:

while true
do
echo "---------------------------------" >> /tmp/mem_usage
date >> /tmp/mem_usage
ps aux >> /tmp/mem_usage
sleep 60
done