Top

Top stands for Table of Processes. It is a program that shows you a list of processes running on the system, along with system statistics on load average and available memory. The display refreshes about once a second.

is useful for seeing what processes are bogging down your system performance, or finding out the overall health of your system's processor and memory.

Pressing 'M' (capital-M) tells top to sort by memory usage. Besides the obvious reason, this is useful to keep the list in approximately the same order from update to update, making it easier to keep track of a given process.

= Use =

multi-processor-view
To view a summary about the user/system/io load of each logical processor, type 1. You can get back to the normal view by typing 1 again.

renice
r or n... then pid

kill
press k, then type the pid

quit
To quit top, type q.

= See also =
 * diagnostics
 * performance
 * top's man page
 * free
 * ps
 * uptime
 * atop
 * slabtop
 * w