[Techtalk] Help with memory units in top (or other ways to monitor per process system resource consumption)

[Camilla]

Hi chixxorrs!

I am running some data analysis processes on a Linux and I need to monitor
the system resources that these processes consume.
I am piping batched outputs from top with a 10s delay into a file and then
checking that. My problem is that top displays the memory in the VIRT
column in what I assume is megabytes.

Is there any way to make top toggle the units (ie make it display the mem
in bytes)? A look in the man pages suggested the -M option flag, but
unfortunately that only toggles the units in the memory stats in the top
header.
Googling has not returned anything productive.

The nix flavour of the day is Amazon Linux.


In short:
1. Can I change the memory units in top?
2. What other ways could I monitor the resource usage of a particular
process?
(Prefer shell tools.)

Kind regards,
Camilla