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Htop - better top

htop.sourceforge.net

70 pointsjuvenn28 comments

This is definitely my favorite HTop screenshot: http://htop.sourceforge.net/128.png

i bet, it needs 80% of all cpus, as you can see, to show all that graphs =D

Is that a NUMA box?

I always have a screen session open with htop in one terminal. I take it for granted so much the lack of htop bothers me if I need to do any form of process management.

htop and atop are my top two top tools

http://www.atoptool.nl/downloadatop.php

atop uses color to show when a subsystem goes over warn/critical threshold. it can be run in present time, or can be used to go back in time and "play back the tape"

I generally have one terminal open with htop as well. It's awesome for finding out which of your processes are battering your system

What are some other must-have applications you guys find useful?

ack

tcgrep is good, too.

http://betterthangrep.com/

iftop, mtr

http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/

Dstat

meld, regexxer

strace

ltrace

lsof

Here are the tools I find indispensible as a sys admin:

- screen for accessing servers

- lshw for seeing Linux server hardware config

- cfengine for automating my system administration

It's the first thing I install on any server these days. I always have an SSH terminal open to htop to monitor my server at all times.

htop is not a generic *nix tool. It depends on the Linux kernel (hard dependencies).

Macports version runs just fine on Snow leopard

you are right. It turns out OSX support is here now. Do I have to be binary compatible to Linux to use it on FreeBSD?

It's a great tool nonetheless.

Yes you do, and linprocfs must be mounted.

I just compiled it on my NetBSD laptop from pkgsrc (http://www.netbsd.org/docs/software/packages.html), (http://pkgsrc.se/sysutils/htop), and it works no problems... no Linux emulation/support required.

Pkgsrc is a cross-platform package management system, originating w/ NetBSD project... I've used it on NetBSD and MacOS successfully. Should work with pretty much any *nix-like system.

[edit: though it doesn't appear "fully-integrated". Example: pressing 's' to run strace(1) doesn't work in NetBSD, which uses ktrace(1). Maybe configurable; I haven't got that far...

atop is another useful alternative to top, shows i/o and network activity in addition to all the usual details.

Htop is really useful, you can hide or show userland threads, switch to a tree view, etc. I use it daily.

Am I the only person here who hates htop? I just can't get used to it. The lack of labels and relying on color coding to convey information just obfuscates things for me. I still use top for that reason.

Iam using it so much. I like the graphs which gives me on a first look a faster overview about cpu/ram.

If you got a SMP system every core got his one graph, which wasnt available in top.

At least, its the best alternative to top, in my opinion!

Really, the best of breed ?

TTY & ncurses, what a sad state of affairs.

TTY is keeping you down : http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Removing_The_Big_Kernel_Lock2

Rob Pike was right in 1991 : "Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad."

Plan9 is now older than Unix was when Plan9 was started. Operating System research is dead.

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