Diagnosing and troubleshooting problems with your Raspberry Pi’s memory usage can sometimes be difficult and time consuming. Fortunately, learning how to check your Raspberry Pi’s memory usage is simple and fast with these four easy steps.

Check the memory usage using ‘free’ command.

One of the easiest ways to check your Raspberry Pi’s memory usage is to use the ‘free’ command. This command provides an overview of the system’s RAM and swap space, as well as information about shared memory and buffers. To run this command, open up a Terminal window on the Raspberry Pi and type in ‘free’ followed by pressing return. You will then be presented with a breakdown of how much RAM your Raspberry Pi has available.

Analyze RAM, GPU and CPU related tasks with ‘top’ command.

In addition to the ‘free’ command, you can use the ‘top’ command to diagnose detailed memory usage on your Raspberry Pi. By running ‘top’ in the Terminal window, you will get an overview of running processes related to RAM, GPU and CPU. This can help you identify tasks that may be using too much memory or other system resources and causing performance issues. To exit ‘top’, press CTRL+C on your keyboard.

Monitor memory usage in real time using ‘vmstat’ command.

If you want to monitor your Raspberry Pi memory usage in real time, use the ‘vmstat’ command. This command will display active processes with memories and will give you insight into which programs may be using more than their fair share of RAM. Type ‘vmstat 1’ to have vmstat output data every second. You can configure vmstat further by adding flags to the command such as ‘-m’, which shows detailed information about paging and swapping activities, or ‘-s’, which prints out a summary of memory usage on the system.

Monitor disk activity with ‘iostat’ command.

To get a more detailed overview of your Raspberry Pi memory usage and be able to monitor disk activity, use the ‘iostat’ command. This command shows read/write I/O operations with milliseconds latency, and can provide you with information about processes that are using large chunks of RAM or performing too many operations concurrently. Type ‘iostat 1’ to have iostat output data every second, or type ‘iostat -m’ to see detailed memory stats for active processes.

Log in to Your Raspberry Pi.

To check your Raspberry Pi memory usage, you will first need to log into your Raspberry Pi. If you are logging in via an SSH terminal, you can use the ‘ssh’ command followed by the IP address of your Raspberry Pi. If you logged in directly with a keyboard and mouse, simply enter the username and password of your Raspberry Pi. Once logged in, open up a terminal window using ‘Ctrl + Alt + T’ key combination to access the command line.