Top
From Linuxintro
Contents
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%<html><acronym title="software interrupts">si</acronym></html>, 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. Then, the header looks like this:
Cpu0 : 7.5%us, 41.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 38.8%id, 12.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.4%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 6.0%us, 35.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 51.0%id, 7.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 5.6%us, 38.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 24.3%id, 31.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 7.6%us, 39.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 14.8%id, 37.6%wa, 0.1%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st
normalize to 100%
You can normalize the CPU load to 100% by pressing Shift-i. This is useful if you have more than one logical CPU.
redirect output to a file
top -b -n 1 > top.txt
