Performance Monitoring with top
The easiest-to-use of the process-monitoring utilities is top, so named because it was originally designed to list the top 10 processes currently running on the system, in descending order of CPU usage. The current version of FreeBSD’s top by default shows you every process currently running in any state—somewhere around 40 processes on a freshly installed FreeBSD system.
The benefit that top provides is that it’s interactive and works in real time. When you run it, it takes over your terminal and updates itself every second, giving you instantaneous information about the state of the system at that moment. You can also pass commands to top, such as the kill and renice commands (covered later in this chapter), ...
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