What do they all mean? Let’s dive and try to decipher each set of numbers: In this article, we’ll focus on the overall system health stats in the top section. The second section shows the table of processes (hence the name top!) The first section of the screen shows your server stats: server load, CPU, memory usage and your number of tasks or processes. The toppermost of the poppermost: output from the top command

When you run top, you should see output that looks something like this: But, if you need to install it yourself for some reason, you can find it in the package procps-ng (on Fedora and RHEL). Top is fairly ubuqitous, so you should find it on most Linux systems. To start top, just type top in a terminal. If you want to get a rough idea of the CPU and memory usage of your system, or see a list of the top processes and programs currently running, run top.

The top program is one of the main system and process monitoring commands on Linux. Linux for DevOps: What you need to know Advertisements What is ‘top’?.45 Linux Commands for Beginners: All the top commands on one page.It’s like a Linux command-line equivalent of Windows Task Manager. Top is the first tool I turn to, when I need to investigate a performance issue in Linux. If you want to figure out how overworked (or underworked!) your Linux server is, then dive right into this. This is my complete guide to understanding the plethora of CPU, memory and load stats that you can get from your Linux server, using the top command. # where the input file has the columns ` ` usage-plot.gp top.dat top.png: #!/usr/bin/env gnuplot -persist -c While true do top -p $PID -bMn 1 | egrep '^+' | awk -v now=$(date +%s) '' > top.dat done unix time - memory with m/g suffix - CPU load in % Run this script (perhaps via nohup) to capture the data: #!/bin/sh If you want to monitor the memory and CPU usage of a particular Linux process for a few minutes, perhaps during a performance test, you can capture the data with top and plot them with gnuplot. Keep reading to learn how.

Linux cpu usage by process