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.

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.

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.

Frequently asked questions

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 <command>` 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.

Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.