Linux Administration Cookbook

Local resource measuring tools

Occasionally, it can be incredibly handy to know what a box is doing right this second. Usually, this will be during a debugging session, when you're trying to work out why the website is responding an order of magnitude slower, or why it's taking 5 minutes to type your SSH command on a remote session.

Here, local resource monitors come in handy. We've already touched on these briefly, but this section will look at them in slightly more detail, and will cover some of the more obscure tools that you might find useful when remotely connected to your server.

We're going to look at the classics of free and top, before moving on to the more recent additions, such as netdata and htop.