- You can also view your currently free hard drive space in the top-right corner of the page in the 'X GB free of Y GB' section where 'X' is your Mac's free space and 'Y' is your Mac's total space.
- Check Your Memory Usage. In order to get a handle on your Mac's memory, you need to check to see what's using it in the first place.
When your hard drive starts to fill up, you don’t have to dig through File Explorer to see what’s using space. You can use a disk space analyzer to scan your drive (or just a single folder) and see exactly which folders and files are using space. You can then make an informed decision about what to remove and quickly free up space.
RELATED:7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows
These tools are different from disk cleaning applications, which automatically remove temporary and cache files. An analyzer will just scan your drive and give you a better view of what’s using space, so you can delete the stuff you don’t need.
WinDirStat Is the Best All-Around Tool
The tool will boot and automatically start scanning your memory, running through test after test and informing you if it finds a problem. It will keep running tests until you choose to stop it, allowing you to test how the memory behaves over a longer period of time.
WinDirStat is our preferred tool, and it’s probably all you’ll need. Its interface allows you to see exactly what’s using space on your hard drive at a glance. When you launch WinDirStat, you can tell it to scan all local drives, a single drive like your C: drive, or a specific folder on your computer.
After it finishes scanning, you’ll see three panes. On top, there’s a directory list that shows you the folders using the most space in descending order. On the bottom, there’s a “treemap”
view that shows you a color-coded view of what’s using space. On the right, there’s a file extension list that shows you statistics about which file types are using the most space. It also serves as a legend, explaining the colors that appear in the bottom of the window.
view that shows you a color-coded view of what’s using space. On the right, there’s a file extension list that shows you statistics about which file types are using the most space. It also serves as a legend, explaining the colors that appear in the bottom of the window.
![Program For Mac To Show You Whats Hogging Your Memory Program For Mac To Show You Whats Hogging Your Memory](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126071286/936163011.png)
For example, when you click a directory in the directory list, you’ll see the contents of that directory highlighted in the treemap. You can mouse over a square in the treemap to see what file it represents. You can also click a file extension in the list to see exactly where files of that type are located in the treemap view. Right-click a folder in the directory list and you’ll see options to quickly delete that folder or open it in Explorer.
WinDirStat doesn’t offer a portable app on its website, but you can download a portable version of WinDirStat from PortableApps.com if you’d like to take it with you and use it on various PCs without installing it first.
SpaceSniffer Offers the Best Graphical View
Try SpaceSniffer if you’re looking for something different. SpaceSniffer doesn’t have the directory list included in WinDirStat. It’s just a graphical view that displays folders and the files in them by relative size, like the bottom treemap view in WinDirStat’s interface.
However, unlike WinDirStat’s treemap, you can double-click folders in this interface to drill down graphically. So, if you have a bunch of files taking up space in your C:UsersNameVideos directory, you could double-click each directory in turn to drill down and eventually right-click a file or folder to access options like Delete and Open.
In WinDirStat, you can only drill down through the directory list—not graphically through the treemap view. You’d have to start a new scan of a specific folder to get a new graphical view.
WinDirStat seems more practical, but SpaceSniffer does have the best graphical view. If you don’t care about the directory list, SpaceSniffer is the tool for you. It runs as a portable application, too.
TreeSize Free Has a Slick Interface
If you want something simpler than WinDirStat, TreeSize Free is a good alternative. It provides you with the same directory list and treemap interfaces you’ll see in WinDirStat, but it doesn’t have WinDirStat’s file extension list, and its ribbon-style interface is a little more at home on modern versions of Windows than WinDIrStat’s toolbar. TreeSize Free also adds a convenient scan option to Explorer, so you can right-click any folder in File Explorer and Windows Explorer and select “TreeSize Free” to scan its contents.
To view a treemap in TreeSize Free, click View > Show Treemap. As in the other applications here, you can right-click files or folders in the application to delete or open them.
RELATED:How to Find and Remove Duplicate Files on Windows
While there are paid TreeSize Personal and TreeSize Professional applications, these just add bonus features like the ability to search for duplicate files, which other tools do just fine. You can scan and visualize your disk space using the free version of TreeSize with no problem.
This application is also available as a portable application, so you don’t have to install it before running it, if you prefer.
Windows 10’s Storage Usage Tool Is Built In
RELATED:How to Use Windows 10’s Storage Settings to Free Hard Drive Space
Windows 10 has a storage usage tool that may help you in some cases. It’s not a classic disk space analyzer like the above tools, but it does have some similar features.
To access it, head to Settings > System > Storage and click a drive. You’ll see a list of things taking up space on that drive, from apps and games to system files, videos, photos, and music. Click a category and Windows will suggest things you can remove—for example, you’ll see a list of installed applications which you can sort by the space they take.
While this tool isn’t as powerful as the above ones, it can be helpful for quickly understanding disk usage and freeing space in a pinch. There’s a good chance it will become more powerful in future updates to Windows 10, too.
READ NEXT- › How to Use the chown Command on Linux
- › What’s New in Windows 10’s 20H1 Update, Arriving Spring 2020
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I'm Gonna Show You What's Really Crazy
Active11 months ago
When I check
free
in one of Prod server it showing 70% of memory is being used: 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 % How can I find which process is using the memory?
Below are the top command results:
Gilles573k139139 gold badges11841184 silver badges16951695 bronze badges
sandeepsandeep
5 Answers
This will show you top 10 process that using the most memory:
using top: when you opened top press
m
will short process based on memory usage.But this will not solve your problem, in Linux everything is either file or process. so the files you opened will eating the memory too. so this will not help.
lsof
will give you all opened files with the size of the file or the file offset in bytes.8,89533 gold badges5555 silver badges118118 bronze badges
HackaholicHackaholic
Your ram isn't actually used. Linux just caches the stuff on your disk by default, and puts what it caches in the 'used' section of ram.
If you load applications that actually use that RAM, it will be their for use.
See http://www.linuxatemyram.com/
Jean-Michaël CelerierJean-Michaël Celerier
You can pipe ps and sort to get the process using the most memory.It will also allow you specify other process details you wish to see with it:
Mirrors Lie They Don't Show You What's Inside
PS: The above assumes that your memory column is first 'sort -k 1 -n -r'
HynkHynk
You can use command slabtop to view what slab objects are used by kernel.
Also you can check output of /proc/meminfo
Also you can check output of /proc/meminfo
Look for these 2 lines in the output
Above example shows 68MB of slab cache being used by kernel and 21MB can be reclaimed. To reclaim you can use technique described here https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html-single/Performance_Tuning_Guide/#s-memory-tunables
Dmitry ZayatsDmitry Zayats
For an interactive analysis, you can use
htop
, then hit function key F6
to choose the sort-order, e.g. PERCENT_CPU
(memory usage in percents), M_RESIDENT
(resident memory size, the real memory that is used), M_SIZE
(virtual memory size) or M_SHARE
(size of shared memory). The first two are the relevant numbers.The green lines are threads. Hit (upper case)
K
and H
to hide them.Marc WäckerlinMarc Wäckerlin