Top
From Leo's Notes
Last edited on 30 December 2021, at 01:34.
The top utility is part of the procps-ng package and shows the system's workload and resource status. It is analogous to the task manager in windows.
Usage
Run top -d 1.
To quit, hit q or Ctrl c.
Toggle CPU header with t
CPU Fields Explained
The first few lines of the top command looks similar to this:
Tasks: 137 total, 1 running, 136 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 4.2%sy, 90.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 5.8%st
Mem: 786432k total, 715152k used, 71280k free, 61012k buffers
Swap: 2096472k total, 18304k used, 2078168k free, 168068k cached
The fields on the second line breaks down the CPU usage into 8 categories.
| Field | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| us | user | CPU used by user processes |
| sy | system | CPU used by system/kernel processes |
| ni | nice | CPU used by processes that were reniced |
| id | idle | CPU not used |
| wa | io wait | Essentially idle CPU waiting on IO devices |
| hi | hardware irq | CPU used to service hardware IRQs |
| si | software irq | CPU used to service soft IRQs |
| st | steal time | CPU time which the hypervisor dedicated (or ‘stole’) for other guests in the system. |