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Htop explained

peteris.rocks

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Re: Htop explained

#2

Post by baldfat »

htop is one of the most missed tools when I am on a non-Linux OS.

On servers I find atop to actually be a better tool for finding issues that happen incrementally and not an obvious issue. I think that atop and htop both are very complimentary.

http://www.atoptool.nl/

"Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor for Linux that is capable of reporting the activity of all processes (even if processes have finished during the interval), daily logging of system and process activity for long-term analysis, highlighting overloaded system resources by using colors, etc. At regular intervals, it shows system-level activity related to the CPU, memory, swap, disks (including LVM) and network layers, and for every process (and thread) it shows e.g. the CPU utilization, memory growth, disk utilization, priority, username, state, and exit code. In combination with the optional kernel module netatop, it even shows network activity per process/thread."

Re: Htop explained

#3

Post by TeMPOraL »

Thank you! Great writeup!

I applaud the way you approached it - figuring out every single thing about a tool.

Also, I didn't know about 'od' command. Thanks again!

Re: Htop explained

#5

Post by digi_owl »

baldfat wrote: post #2

htop is one of the most missed tools when I am on a non-Linux OS. On servers I find atop to actually be a better tool for finding issues that happen incrementally and not an obvious issue. I think that atop and htop both are very complimentary. http://www.atoptool.nl/ "Atop is an ASCII full-screen performance monitor for Linux that is capable of reporting the activity of all processes (even if processes have finished…

unless by non-Linux you meant non-unix, htop recently got updated to better support BSDs and OSX/MacOS.

Re: Htop explained

#7

Post by makkes »

> The second number is how much of that time the machine has spent idle, in seconds

Actually, the second number is the sum of the number of seconds that all cores on the machine have spent idle, so that number may be higher than the first one. Source: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

Re: Htop explained

#8

Post by p8donald »

makkes wrote: post #7

> The second number is how much of that time the machine has spent idle, in seconds Actually, the second number is the sum of the number of seconds that all cores on the machine have spent idle, so that number may be higher than the first one. Source: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...

Thanks for catching that. You are right. Here is the source code: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/proc/uptime...

My source (first result in Google) was this link https://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s2-p... which looks like an older version of the documentation that does not have that last sentence.

Re: Htop explained

#9

Post by guessmyname »

I switched to macOS from Linux two weeks ago and I am starting to regret that decision. Most — if not all — the commands that I thought I had mastered after years working on Linux environments stopped working because their BSD counterparts have slightly differences that completely break everything I try to do. It is even more frustrating when I realize that I have to deactivate security features built-in the new Apple computers in order to make things like "dtrace" (the strace alternative) work.
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