Process Monitoring through TOP
Top provides an ongoing look at processor activity in real time. It displays a listing of the most CPU-intensive tasks on the system, and can provide an interactive interface for manipulating processes. It's a good idea to leave top running in aterminal window on machines that are busy but that you are not logged into to help build a history of what is happening on the system.
There are several command line options which can be used to focus the TOP utility on specific things. The first is when starting top use the -d command to specify the type of delay for screen updates, the default is 2 seconds.
Once top is running there are several toggle commands that can be used to sort the display options. The first option is m, which sorts by Mem Statistics based on memory usage.
The i toggle command will cause top to ignore idle and zombie processes. The r toggle command will re-nice a process when you want to change the priority of a process. Some other commands are as follows: N sort tasks by pid, A sort tasks by age, P sort tasks by CPU usage, T sort tasks by time / cumulative time.
You can kill processes from within top with the k toggle command you will be prompted to select the PID you want killed and the signal you want sent to the process, either select 9 or 15.
The configuration files for top can be found at, /etc/toprc and ~/.toprc. The global configuration file may be used to restrict the usage of top to the secure mode for non-non-privileged users. The personal configuration file contains two lines. The first line contains lower and upper letters to specify which fields in what order are to be displayed. The letters correspond to the letters in the Fields or Order screens from top.
As always if you have any further questions the first place to start is the man pages.
There are several command line options which can be used to focus the TOP utility on specific things. The first is when starting top use the -d command to specify the type of delay for screen updates, the default is 2 seconds.
Once top is running there are several toggle commands that can be used to sort the display options. The first option is m, which sorts by Mem Statistics based on memory usage.
The i toggle command will cause top to ignore idle and zombie processes. The r toggle command will re-nice a process when you want to change the priority of a process. Some other commands are as follows: N sort tasks by pid, A sort tasks by age, P sort tasks by CPU usage, T sort tasks by time / cumulative time.
You can kill processes from within top with the k toggle command you will be prompted to select the PID you want killed and the signal you want sent to the process, either select 9 or 15.
The configuration files for top can be found at, /etc/toprc and ~/.toprc. The global configuration file may be used to restrict the usage of top to the secure mode for non-non-privileged users. The personal configuration file contains two lines. The first line contains lower and upper letters to specify which fields in what order are to be displayed. The letters correspond to the letters in the Fields or Order screens from top.
As always if you have any further questions the first place to start is the man pages.
