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Use the top command to identify processes that currently consume the most memory and CPU time. The display is updated periodically. Press q to quit top.
top's display varies somewhat depending on which flavor of Unix you are using. It usually displays some system status information and for each process, the process number, owner, program name and memory and CPU usage as percentages or in absolute terms. Below is some sample output from top.
last pid: 22336; load averages: 0.12, 0.11, 0.09 11:39:58 80 processes: 73 sleeping, 6 zombie, 1 on cpu Memory: 256M real, 90M free, 34M swap in use, 351M swap free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME CPU COMMAND 21440 root 1 35 -3 12M 11M sleep 0:20 1.74% ncftpd 22336 mortimer 1 -7 0 1368K 1264K cpu/0 0:00 0.63% top 21075 root 1 34 -3 1832K 1456K sleep 0:16 0.33% ncftpd 127 msql 1 -25 0 1640K 936K sleep 254:03 0.18% msql2d 22305 www 1 33 0 2728K 2112K sleep 0:00 0.04% httpd 22304 www 1 33 0 2728K 2112K sleep 0:00 0.04% httpd 22308 www 1 33 0 2728K 2112K sleep 0:00 0.02% httpd 22296 www 1 33 0 2728K 2112K sleep 0:00 0.02% httpd 22302 www 1 33 0 2656K 2056K sleep 0:00 0.02% httpd 250 root 1 33 0 840K 576K sleep 0:02 0.02% utmpd 22299 www 1 33 0 2728K 2128K sleep 0:00 0.02% httpd 22298 www 1 33 0 2728K 2112K sleep 0:00 0.02% httpd 22310 root 1 34 -3 1848K 1504K sleep 0:00 0.01% ncftpd 22306 www 1 33 0 2736K 2120K sleep 0:00 0.01% httpd 22295 www 1 33 0 2728K 2112K sleep 0:00 0.01% httpdHere, PRI is the priority that the process has in the kernel (based on a number of factors including age, size, owner, and niceness), NICE or niceness describes how the process ranks in priority before factors such as age and size are incorporated, and TIME is the number of CPU seconds that have been used by the process.
top is interactive, allowing you to change its display on the fly. Check out the manual page for details.
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