Top

Overview

The command top shows you the top CPU consuming processes, for example like this:

top - 11:21:16 up 1 day,  2:04,  9 users,  load average: 0.99, 0.71, 0.43
Tasks: 269 total,   1 running, 268 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  7.5%us,  1.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 90.7%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   4050980k total,  3889816k used,   161164k free,   178940k buffers
Swap:  9999992k total,       68k used,  9999924k free,  2263740k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
  688 staerk    20   0  177m  54m  15m S   36  1.4  18:49.46 npviewer.bin
 7968 root      20   0 1005m 764m 740m S    5 19.3  36:06.35 vmware-vmx
32093 staerk    20   0 99.4m  78m 7132 S    2  2.0   4:29.59 nxagent
 2470 root      20   0 16944 1412  940 R    1  0.0   0:00.06 top
31336 root      20   0  180m  21m  14m S    1  0.5   0:07.36 xchat
31013 root      20   0  291m  73m 4984 S    0  1.9   2:28.11 Xorg
32318 staerk    27   7  356m  27m  10m S    0  0.7   0:02.12 beagled
    1 root      20   0  1064  384  324 S    0  0.0   0:01.30 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.06 migration/0
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:01.22 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.14 migration/1
    6 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.66 ksoftirqd/1

By default, the display changes every second.

quit top

You can quit top by pressing q.

sort

You can sort by memory consumption by pressing M.

multi-processor-view

You can show all logical processor (and switch back to the aggregated view) by pressing 1.