How can you monitor and analyze memory usage in the Linux operating system?

To monitor and analyze memory usage in Linux, several tools and approaches can be used:

• Command free — shows overall memory usage, including free, used, buffers, and cache.

  free -h
  

• Command top or htop — interactive utilities for viewing processes and their memory consumption in real-time.

• Command vmstat — displays virtual memory statistics, including swap usage.

• Viewing /proc/meminfo — contains detailed information about memory status.

  cat /proc/meminfo
  

• Memory profiling tools (e.g., valgrind, massif) — for analyzing memory usage by specific applications.

• Monitoring with system tools: Prometheus with node_exporter, Grafana for visualization.

These methods allow both quick assessment of current memory status and in-depth analysis to identify leaks or inefficient usage.