“For desktop users, monitoring resource usage is an important task. By doing this, we can locate system bottlenecks, plan what to do to optimize our system, identify memory leaks, and so on. The problem is which software one should use and how to use it according to our needs. Among many monitoring tools that are available, most people use ‘top’. Top provides almost everything we need to monitor our system’s resource usage within a single shot. In this article, all the information is based on procps 3.2.5 running on top of Linux kernel 2.6.x.”
htop http://htop.sourceforge.net/ is a great frontend to top.
Wow — thanks for the tip! htop is VERY nice. I never knew about it before.
Thanks!
Wouldn’t it make more sense to use sysstat (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/) and log performance data for long term analysis (including disk performance data)? Why is he trying to reinvent sar using top?
Top has some really nice features when run in the standard interactive mode.
‘u’ type a username to filter all processes by user.
‘r’ renice a process.
‘k’ kill a process.
‘B’ enables bold mode.
These are features I use all of the time. You might also take a look at htop, that is a great tool http://htop.sourceforge.net/.
For performance history, use sar / iostat, not top.
This great aix tool is now also availiable for linux:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/articles/analyze_aix/…
Nmon is definitely nice, haven’t used it since I left my last job (AIX admin).
top can distort resuolts by being a CPU hog itself. solaris prstat does a better job:
http://users.tpg.com.au/bdgcvb/DTrace/prstatvstop.html
http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/prstat.html
http://www.solarisinternals.com/si/tools/prstat/index.php