StatsDawg

To See What Your Server Is Barking At

Process List

The process list shows a fair amount of information, but most notably, it shows a list of all the running processes on the system. This list is, by default, sorted by CPU usage. As a result, the processes which are using the most time on the CPU(s) will be towards the top of the list:

Process List

top - 13:31:00 up 26 days, 19:13,  1 user,  load average: 0.29, 0.07, 0.02
Tasks: 141 total,   4 running, 137 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 11.1% us,  4.2% sy,  0.0% ni, 83.0% id,  1.6% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.1% si
Mem:    516084k total,   444676k used,    71408k free,    94476k buffers
Swap:  2075464k total,       60k used,  2075404k free,   121752k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
24607 apache    17   0 83824  23m 2876 R  7.4  4.6   0:00.76 apache2           
24606 apache    15   0 83824  23m 2876 S  7.3  4.6   0:00.73 apache2           
 8726 timsoder  16   0  2040 1108  828 R  0.1  0.2   0:00.03 top               
    1 root      16   0  1452  452  400 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.12 init              
    2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0       
    3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 events/0          
    4 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.02 khelper    
...

In this example, the top running processes are two apache threads, each using about 7.5% of the CPU and 4.6% of physical memory (RAM). The process list also includes other information, such as the amount of virtual memory and shared memory usage by a particular process. It also shows the break down of how time on the CPU was allocated, although this is also available in visual form by viewing the memory usage graph. For more information, it may be helpful to consult the manual page for 'top' which is available by typing 'man top' in a terminal window.

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