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
3
votes
3 answers
finding kernel space programs
how can we determine %sy process that is Consuming CPU.
In the following case there is no netfilter and traffic is under 1 mbps.but still system process are taking too much cpu and cpu usage for niced process are also high.How can we determine the…
![](../../users/profiles/130107.webp)
Kevin Parker
- 757
- 1
- 13
- 29
3
votes
2 answers
Monitor CPU usage over period of time on Ubuntu
Is there some way to monitor my CPU usage over a period of time, e.g. get a graph that shows CPU% vs. date/time? I occasionally see high load using htop, but I'd like to see what's happening throughout the day.
The more lightweight, the better :)
![](../../users/profiles/108216.webp)
user967722
- 247
- 1
- 4
- 5
3
votes
2 answers
Top showing 64% idle on first screen or batch run, while there is no idle time at all
I'm running a quite heavy number crunching thing on a few 4 core servers, all running Ubuntu Precise Pangolin LTS 64 bit, in the cloud (so I suppose in a virtualized environment).
To monitor the cpu usage, i wrote a .sh that uses "top -b -n 1" (that…
![](../../users/profiles/128789.webp)
Simone Gianni
- 176
- 6
3
votes
3 answers
top reports swap at 100%, free memory available
On RedHat 5 servers, we see top reporting swap has 0k free. vmstat shows the same amount of swap used, but no paging. We kill our only app, and top still reports 100% of swap used. If we reboot, swap goes to 0k used. Any comments: am I…
![](../../users/profiles/106178.webp)
cvsdave
- 141
- 5
3
votes
2 answers
Ubuntu server using too much memory
my server is at a very high memory usage constantly - to the point that it won't let me log in via ssh some times. I have to reboot the server before I can log in and when it's restarted the memory drops to ~90% usage and slowly works it's way up to…
![](../../users/profiles/76524.webp)
Jacksonkr
- 455
- 1
- 6
- 16
3
votes
1 answer
How do I tell real CPU load in a xen environment?
I have a Debian machine with 4 CPU cores running Xen with two virtual machines, and I'm having trouble determining overall real CPU usage.
Each machine has two VCPUs assigned to it with no cap on CPU use:
Domain-0 0 …
![](../../users/profiles/38856.webp)
Conspicuous Compiler
- 179
- 2
- 12
3
votes
1 answer
top, w, ps showing wrong CPU times
I've spotted this trait recently on some of my Ubuntu servers (10.04.2) on Amazon EC2 (not noticed this on any physical boxes), and can't quite comprehend how it's getting these figures. They can't be real, because I'm sure computers haven't been…
![](../../users/profiles/92643.webp)
dannosaur
- 953
- 5
- 15
3
votes
1 answer
How can I find the source of my high load issues on Ubuntu server?
We have an Ubuntu 10.4 VPS serving a Rails site which often shows pretty high load, but doesn't have high CPU or memory numbers. Reading a lot of other questions here on Server Fault suggests to me that this is an I/O issue (i.e. there are processes…
![](../../users/profiles/39440.webp)
pjmorse
- 1,450
- 1
- 17
- 34
3
votes
2 answers
How to log processes shown in top by user to a text file?
I need to log all processes (including the amount of CPU usage used, the time it was running for, etc...) to a txt file; preferably one entry per line as it appears in top.
The user appears to be running an abusive process via cron however I want to…
KJB
3
votes
2 answers
Where does top get its CPU usage data from?
I want to write some scripts that will measure the CPU use, but top's output, while pleasant for the user, isn't really feasible for processing in a script.
Richard
3
votes
4 answers
Monitoring linux processes
Is there an option for linux top command where i can filter processes by name?
For example, I only want to monitor python processes (there are several of them), and I'd like to do something like top -option "python" or something like that.
![](../../users/profiles/34232.webp)
mgs
- 135
- 1
- 4
3
votes
2 answers
100% CPU usage reported, but no processes using the CPU
I am running Debian 10 (kernel 4.19.0-18-amd64) on bare metal and I have recently noticed strange CPU usage.
Screenshot of htop, sorted by CPU%
Screenshot of top, sorted by CPU%
As you can see, 100% CPU usage is reported over all of the cores but…
![](../../users/profiles/882347.webp)
tomf
- 31
- 1
2
votes
1 answer
docker stats memory lower than top's rss
I created a container, in which I've created ~10 processes. I want to analyze how much memory they're consuming. To achieve that, I ran top inside the container, and docker stats outside.
In top, I see 10 processes, each taking 50MB of resident…
![](../../users/profiles/457238.webp)
speller
- 131
- 5
2
votes
1 answer
Identify the top processes when the overall system has large CPU utilization in Ubuntu server
I have a Ubuntu server running in EC2.
Occasionally, I get a large CPU usage 99+% utilization as measured in EC2 monitoring dashboard, even though most times it is less than 10%.
Since traffic to my site is spiky, and many times happens at the…
![](../../users/profiles/363786.webp)
JackDaniels
- 121
- 2
2
votes
1 answer
Colulmn width of "top" entries
The username column in the output of top command shows a + for the names that are longer than the column width. How can I increase that?
I don't see any option for that.
![](../../users/profiles/158757.webp)
mahmood
- 962
- 7
- 18
- 31