How do I run an adb shell command?

Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run adb shell from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run adb shell on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use adb exec-out instead of adb shell: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.

Do adb shell commands need root?

Not the ones on this reference. They run as the shell user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most dumpsys services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through run-as on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading /data/anr directly.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits dumpsys hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop adb server has to be stopped first, and adb forward and adb reverse cannot work in a browser at all.

dumpsys meminfo

read-only

Which processes are using the most memory, measured as proportional set size.

Command: adb shell dumpsys meminfo
Commands: System services (dumpsys)
Risk: read-only

Syntax

dumpsys meminfo

Examples

```
dumpsys meminfo
```
The summary sections: memory per process, and the RAM totals.
```
top -b -n 1 -m 10
```
Cheaper, and gives resident memory rather than proportional.

Reading the output

Sample output

Applications Memory Usage (in Kilobytes):
Uptime: 5178721 Realtime: 5178721

Total PSS by process:
    353,876K: com.google.android.gms.persistent (pid 3062 / activities)
    215,668K: system (pid 1650)
     94,952K: surfaceflinger (pid 842)

Rows are already sorted largest first, and the numbers are kilobytes with comma grouping — `1,234,567K` is one number, and a reader that stops at the first comma reports 1 MB for a 1.2 GB process. Proportional set size divides each shared page by the number of processes mapping it, so these numbers add up to something close to the real footprint, which resident set sizes do not.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
N,NNNK:	Proportional set size in kilobytes, comma-grouped.
(pid N / activities)	The process id and a qualifier — `activities`, `services`, `cached`. It is how you tell a live app from a cached corpse holding the same memory.
Total RAM / Free RAM / Used RAM	Whole-device totals, also in comma-grouped kilobytes.

What access it needs

Two permissions, both already held: the memory binder calls `DumpUtils.checkDumpAndUsageStatsPermission` with the literal tag `meminfo`, so refusals name that lowercase word rather than a class, and it wants `android.permission.DUMP` together with `android.permission.PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS`. The Shell manifest declares both, and the usage-stats path short-circuits `SHELL_UID` before the app-op is consulted, so an authorised `adb` connection is enough — no root, no `adb root`, no "Usage access" grant in Settings. The cost, not the permission, is what you have to plan around, and it is worse than the per-process walk suggests. The binder's `dump` wraps the entire dump in `enableFreezer(false)` … `enableFreezer(true)`, so for as long as this command runs **every frozen cached app on the device is unfrozen**, and they are re-frozen only when it finishes. On top of that each surviving process is sent a binder transaction and computes its own figure by walking its own memory maps. Running this on a timer therefore does not merely measure the phone, it changes the thing being measured: cached apps that were costing nothing wake up, and the CPU spike you were investigating acquires a contribution from your own tooling. The Android System Monitor sends it on a slow cadence behind a toggle for exactly this reason; `top` is the cheap answer when resident memory will do.

Failure messages, decoded

Message	Meaning
Permission Denial: can't dump meminfo from from pid=4821, uid=10231 due to missing android.permission.DUMP permission	The tag is the bare word `meminfo` because that is the literal string the memory binder passes, and the doubled `from from` is genuine AOSP text. Written to stdout, in place of the table, so an automated reader that scans for `K:` rows sees a device with no processes rather than a refused call.
* SERVICE 'meminfo' DUMP TIMEOUT (10000ms) EXPIRED *	Ten seconds is the `dumpsys` default and this is the dump most likely to reach it on a loaded phone, because the deadline covers every process's own map walk. What you keep is a truncated table, and since rows are sorted largest first the missing tail is the small processes — so a truncated dump still answers "what is biggest" and can never be summed into a device total.
Unknown argument: -x; use -h for help	An option the memory dump's argument loop does not recognise. It prints this on stdout and carries on with the arguments it did understand rather than aborting, so a mistyped flag yields a full dump of a different shape instead of an error — the failure mode here is a plausible answer to a question you did not ask.
Can't find service: meminfo	Printed to stderr by the `dumpsys` binary: the service manager has no `meminfo` entry, which is normal before boot completes and after a `system_server` restart. Nothing was asked of the service, so this is not the same as an empty table — and captured without `2>&1` it is invisible.

Version and vendor notes

This is the most expensive thing you can ask a phone for. It walks every running process, sends each one a binder transaction, and each of them computes its own figure by walking its memory maps — hundreds of milliseconds to a couple of seconds of real CPU, on the device you are watching for CPU spikes. Do not put it on a one-second timer.
Proportional and resident set sizes are different quantities and must never be presented as the same one; `top` gives you the latter for free.
On low-memory configurations the section can be titled by resident size instead, because proportional collection is disabled there.
AOSP prints an RSS section ahead of the PSS section — `Total RSS by process:` then `Total PSS by process:` — on every release from tag android-11.0.0_r1 through android-15.0.0_r1, so an RSS heading at the top of the dump is the normal layout.
The dump unfreezes every frozen cached app for its whole duration and re-freezes them at the end, so running it on a timer changes the memory and CPU picture it is reporting.

We have a UI for this

Android System Monitor runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android System Monitor

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as dumpsys meminfo.

Command	What it does
top	A one-shot process table: CPU share, memory, state and command line.
am force-stop	Kills every process and service belonging to one app.
dumpsys battery	The battery service's live state: level, status, health, voltage and temperature.

More System services (dumpsys) commands

Command	What it does
dumpsys diskstats	Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage.
dumpsys thermalservice	Whether the phone is throttling, and every thermal zone the hardware layer reports, in degrees Celsius.
dumpsys sensorservice	Every sensor the phone has, with its vendor, type, rates and batching — plus a buffer of recent readings.
dumpsys package	Everything the package manager knows about one app: version, paths, flags, install source and per-user state.
dumpsys activity activities	Which app is in the foreground, and the task and stack structure behind it.
dumpsys dropbox	The platform's ring buffer of crashes, ANRs and tombstones — how you read ANR traces without root.

Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.