One entry in the build a better top category is a program named htop (another is atop). It's usually available as a package on modern Linux systems. In addition to niceties like color, two of its features make it a compelling improvement over regular top for some users. The first is that it shows CPU usage broken down by individual CPU. This makes it much easier to distinguish the situation where a single process is using all of a CPU from when many processes are using a portion of one. htop also displays processes in a hierarchy tree format, based on which they spawned. This is a particularly useful way to display PostgreSQL processes.
htop for Linux
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