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Using Top More Efficiently

  Submitted by Mark Linux 7 Comments

“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.”

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Thom Holwerda

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7 Comments

  1. 2006-03-28 5:29 pm
    da_Chicken

    htop http://htop.sourceforge.net/ is a great frontend to top.

    • 2006-03-28 7:53 pm
      Knuckles

      Wow — thanks for the tip! htop is VERY nice. I never knew about it before.

      Thanks!

  2. 2006-03-28 5:36 pm
    Robert Escue

    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?

  3. 2006-03-28 8:18 pm
    SEJeff

    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.

  4. 2006-03-28 9:18 pm
    dodo

    This great aix tool is now also availiable for linux:

    http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/articles/analyze_aix/…

    • 2006-03-28 9:34 pm
      Robert Escue

      Nmon is definitely nice, haven’t used it since I left my last job (AIX admin).