top is a Unix/Linux/BSD program to show what processing are running. It can show the top users of CPU or memory.
Questions tagged [top]
294 questions
4
votes
2 answers
top command occupied high cpu usage
My system is SUSE 10 and I observe that top occupies 57% CPU usage when I use it.
I don't have too many processes:
ps -eLf | wc -l
106
Here are top's stats:
cat /proc/2913/stat
2913 (top) R 2879 2913 2879 34819 2913 8396800 411 0 0 0 60648 199580…
![](../../users/profiles/68425.webp)
DaVid
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4
votes
2 answers
Linux top command. Memory usage
I am testing my web server with Jmeter. I launch 40 users test, then dump top command.
What i see, is 40 (+1 host) apache processes. Each process uses appr. 7mb of RES memory. But 7*40 is 280 mb of memory. But top shows that there are 508mb total…
![](../../users/profiles/95904.webp)
zim32
- 141
- 4
4
votes
2 answers
Load average at 1, even though I've stopped all services!
I have a virtual server running Debian 5 where any action is very slow (like password verification when logging in via SSH or doing su). I checked the load average, which is hovering around 1-2. Then I stopped all services (apache, mysql, postfix,…
![](../../users/profiles/80229.webp)
Aron
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4
votes
1 answer
Which PHP script is overloading my VPS?
Is there a way to get the PHP script filename that is currently hammering my VPS?
For example, when I view "top", I see:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
7622 itil 17 0 61388 11m 6004 R 45.8 2.3 0:00.13…
![](../../users/profiles/38753.webp)
psx
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4
votes
4 answers
Linux high memory usage (top total mismatch)
I havea poor mans vps - 256MB dedicated RAM. I have installed LAMP. No website is currently UP on the server yet.
The memory usage is still 225MB (only 31 MB free).
I have measured using top and another method. Top says around 225mb used, but if I…
JP19
4
votes
5 answers
Linux server performance profiling - how to see what caused high load
If a server is experiencing high load, I use top and similar tools to troubleshoot why. However, this is only effective if I can analyze while the server is experiencing the problem.
What are some good tools for finding root cause of high server…
![](../../users/profiles/53499.webp)
mark
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4
votes
5 answers
Give me my KILL-power when something goes wrong
We've had it a few times now. Suddenly our production server won't respond because a process is in an infinite loop, or the MySQL server stops serving new requests because one query is blocking everything...
We SSH to the server and use ps aux or…
![](../../users/profiles/42676.webp)
Konerak
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4
votes
3 answers
Why does 'top' indicate low memory usage, whilst 'free' indicates high memory usage?
Why does 'top' indicate low memory usage, whilst 'free' indicates high memory usage?
Mem: 262144k total, 225708k used, 36436k free, 47948k buffers
Swap: 262136k total, 40k used, 262096k free, 110704k cached
PID USER PR…
![](../../users/profiles/24628.webp)
Sai
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3
votes
1 answer
Why are cpu usage percentage different between top and iostat?
On a heavily loaded database server, I am getting vastly different output from top and iostat for cpu usage. Why might the value be different?
top:
%Cpu(s): 84.7 us, 11.8 sy, 0.3 ni, 2.4 id, 0.6 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.2 si, 0.1 st
iostat
avg-cpu: …
![](../../users/profiles/163207.webp)
AgDude
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3
votes
1 answer
What could be causing load spikes on this EC2 instance?
I have an Amazon EC2 instance (c1.medium, ami-ed46a784) that experiences short spikes in load average every 32 hours or so. The average load is normally around 0.15 but rises to 3+ for about 15 minutes during these spikes. During this time there is…
![](../../users/profiles/11475.webp)
Garret Heaton
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3
votes
4 answers
Linux memory usage
We've been having some Linux memory usage problems on some of our servers. free, top, ps, and vmstat are all showing 261M free out of 1G (~25%). However, adding up the amount of memory shown per process in top shows that we should be using very…
![](../../users/profiles/9267.webp)
JamesArmes
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3
votes
1 answer
How to understand the "SIZE" output of the command top on FreeBSD
I am working on a VPS with 512 of RAM, I installed mysql, run the command top and found that the value of SIZE for mysql is 638M:
last pid: 2023; load averages: 0.17, 0.19, 0.21 …
![](../../users/profiles/94862.webp)
nbari
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3
votes
2 answers
Why is this server reporting high memory usage
It seems that given the memory percentage of the processes listed, my server should not be at 98% memory usage. Why is the cumulative memory usage so high?
top - 14:34:50 up 14 days, 22:54, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
Tasks: 139 total,…
![](../../users/profiles/277673.webp)
cdosborn
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3
votes
3 answers
CentOS 7.1 - Reverting to Old Functionality of top and service
I recently installed a fresh CentOS 7.1 server. I'm noticing a few differences from CentOS 6.7, and I'm hoping there is a way to revert to an old view of certain things.
For example:
Question 1: top
The Top command displays data differently. For…
![](../../users/profiles/191474.webp)
Scott Summers
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3
votes
1 answer
Running 'top' with 'Irix mode' off in batch mode
Can anyone tell me how I can tweak the following top command so that it always runs in Solaris mode in a batch mode operation?
top -d 3 -n 2 -b -p
I need 'top' to output a process' CPU usage that had already been divided by the total number…
![](../../users/profiles/10292.webp)
His
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