Linux Administration Cookbook

top

An old friend, and guaranteed to be installed on any Unix or Unix-like system, top is your immediate window into what your system thinks it's doing:

$ top

The output for the preceding command is shown as follows:

Right from the start, we can see several things:

• The time in the top left, and how long the box has been up – 17:09:46 up 8 min
• The number of users logged in – 1 user
• The load average – 0.00, 0.03, 0.03
• The number of running, sleeping, and so on tasks
• CPU usage information
• Volatile memory information (RAM)
• SWAP information (disk memory)

Breaking these down, let's look at some in more detail:

• Load average: In detail, the load ...