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 ...
