Questions tagged [top]

top is a Unix/Linux/BSD program to show what processing are running. It can show the top users of CPU or memory.

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TIME column in TOP command for mysql

When I run top on my database server I get that mysqld has been running for 4:00.51 and it continues to go up. I assume this means that one process with mysql has been running this long from other ...
michael's user avatar
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3 votes
1 answer
1k views

How to interpret increasing SHR reported by top?

The man page for top defines SHR as: t: SHR -- Shared Mem size (kb) The amount of shared memory used by a task. It simply reflects memory that could be potentially shared with other ...
MilesHampson's user avatar
36 votes
2 answers
23k views

How to get top command output to show rake arguments?

In the past, all of our servers have automatically shown command arguments passed to rake when we view them in top. For example: But on this particular server, we get this instead (picture is top ...
wbharding's user avatar
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1 answer
241 views

Linux released memory

If My process allocates some big memory and then deallocates, would top or gnome-system-monitor show that my memory usage of that process decreased ? or kernel will still reserve that memory for that ...
user59088's user avatar
  • 109
2 votes
2 answers
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Linux: Finding the system processes which are at the top

I am running a multithreaded program on my 8-core processor. top command shows 8 processes are running and each one utilizes a core by 100%. The problem is that only 21% are marked as user cpu and my ...
lashgar's user avatar
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4 votes
2 answers
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0% CPU in top for all processes, but load average > 1

On two different servers (with Ubuntu 12.04LTS AMD64) I have seen the following behaviour: op - 10:50:05 up 305 days, 21:17, 1 user, load average: 1.94, 2.52, 2.97 Tasks: 141 total, 2 running, ...
fadedbee's user avatar
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2 votes
2 answers
7k views

Live monitoring on web server logs by tailing the webserver access log

I am looking for a way to find who causes high load on my nginx web server but I do have too many requests per minutes to figure it out which one is the real cause. I want a solution that would work ...
sorin's user avatar
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-2 votes
3 answers
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How to solve memory issues in Linux

How to get details of a process that is taking RAM. From top command i have found that Mysql is taking too much ram how can i know why Mysql is taking too much ram far from usual behavior? Is there ...
tough-network's user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
3k views

How do you measure the memory footprint of a set of forked processes?

Say I've got a process using 200MB of memory, and it fork()s: python -c "import os; data='x'*200000000; os.fork(); raw_input()" Programs like 'top' will show each process using 200MB, with very ...
Dustin Boswell's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
780 views

how can I tell if there is a cpu trashing on my linux machine

I want to write a script that will kill my processes when my machine is doing "too much" swapping of process memory from disk to memory. What is the best way to determine that? I saw top has %wa and ...
oshai's user avatar
  • 109
3 votes
2 answers
6k views

Monitor CPU usage over period of time on Ubuntu

Is there some way to monitor my CPU usage over a period of time, e.g. get a graph that shows CPU% vs. date/time? I occasionally see high load using htop, but I'd like to see what's happening ...
user967722's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
1k views

Top showing 64% idle on first screen or batch run, while there is no idle time at all

I'm running a quite heavy number crunching thing on a few 4 core servers, all running Ubuntu Precise Pangolin LTS 64 bit, in the cloud (so I suppose in a virtualized environment). To monitor the cpu ...
Simone Gianni's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
5k views

top process state column under FreeBSD

When running top interactively, I can see various words in the state column : nanslp, biord, select, uwait, lockf, pause, kqread, piperd, sbwait ... Some like nanslp or kqread are self explanatory, ...
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2 votes
2 answers
4k views

How to show high usage user's username with the top command, if the username is too long?

I'm having problem identifying high usage users on a shared Linux machine. I use the "top" command and it does show which commands are using the most CPU. But the usernames on this server all start ...
Qi Fan's user avatar
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2 votes
1 answer
273 views

ps -o pcpu on Debian Squeeze is giving meaningless numbers

I'm trying to get the CPU percentage for processes on a busy server out of ps, but it's giving me nonsensical numbers. Here's a truncated example: $ ps -eo pcpu,pid | sort -n %CPU PID ... 36.5 ...
regularfry's user avatar
1 vote
4 answers
347 views

Is there any tool that I can use to monitor memory usage of each process on Linux easily? [closed]

This issue is not the same as the question on how to see the memory usage of a Linux process. Also, the top command doesn't give the exact memory used, but just what percentage one process uses, so ...
giantforest's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
5k views

How to read `top`. Process list says processes have swap but overview says no swap is being used

I am using top to monitor my server. The swap row reads Swap: 1044220k total, 0k used, 1044220k free, 148544k cached I have hit O p to sort by swap. PID USER PR NI VIRT RES ...
dm03514's user avatar
  • 201
13 votes
1 answer
14k views

Why does top report a different cpu usage than CloudWatch?

top shows an average CPU usage during peak times of about 20% while CloudWatch monitoring shows an average CPU usage of 40%. What causes this discrepancy?
user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

Linux top not tallying with java used memory

We have a java application where towards the last part of the codes we wrote these lines Runtime runtime = Runtime.getRuntime(); long memory = runtime.totalMemory() - runtime.freeMemory(); System....
user132638's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
745 views

free -m is showing total of 309 Mb for a system with 4GB RAM

OS:Xen Cloud Platform 1.1 (XCP) modified centos, and xen server 5.0 running on intel i5 free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 309 ...
ananthan's user avatar
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-3 votes
2 answers
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Load Average too high.Top not showing much?How to find the process?

Debian 6.0 running on VPS with single core and 3 Gb RAM. top - 09:24:19 up 17 days, 13:05, 2 users, load average: 14.79, 16.19, 11.10 Tasks: 14 total, 1 running, 13 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 ...
ananthan's user avatar
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1 vote
1 answer
645 views

How to determine httpd memory usage

If I have this output from top for httpd, how do I determine its total memory usage? 16924 apache 20 0 203m 7108 2852 S 0.0 0.2 0:03.48 httpd ...
jemminger's user avatar
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1 answer
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load-causing processes disappearing from "top" ps -o pcpu shows bogus numbers

I administer a large number of servers, and I have this problem only with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS: I run a server under normal load (say load average 3.0 on an 8-core server). The "top" command shows ...
Alec Matusis's user avatar
1 vote
3 answers
3k views

No apparent reason for high load average

We have several web servers running on Amazon (ec2) c1.xlarge, over Amazon AMI. The servers are duplicates of each other, running the exact same hardware and software. Each server spec is: 7 GB of ...
Oz.'s user avatar
  • 21
0 votes
1 answer
3k views

How to get Network Data Received and Data Sent Information on Mac OS X?

I want to store the network data received and data sent information on a variable or in a file. Using the below command I can grep it and print the line on screen. But I'm not able to store the info ...
abhiomkar's user avatar
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1 vote
2 answers
1k views

No clue for high load average on top

We have several machines on Amazon (ec2) of the type c1.xlarge with 16 cpus, running the Amazon AMI. Details on the machine: 7 GB of memory 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute ...
Oz.'s user avatar
  • 21
10 votes
2 answers
14k views

Why does ec2 monitoring show 100% cpu and top only 20%?

I am running an python script on an ec2 instance that inserts rows in an database on another instance. In ec2's monitoring I saw a 100% cpu utilization, whereas top only shows 20% for the python ...
RickyA's user avatar
  • 300
0 votes
2 answers
3k views

load average in top and procs in vmstat

As far as I know, the load average in top is the numbers of precess(threads) in running or uninterrupted sleep status, So it should be equal to (procs-r +1 )+ procs-b in vmstat, but in practice, this ...
Mingfei.hua's user avatar
1 vote
2 answers
1k views

Solaris: what's a kernel trap?

I'm trying to understand whether the high trap count reported by top on Solaris 10 Kernel: 1659 ctxsw, 1069 trap, 4433 intr, 3837 syscall, 5 fork Memory: 8192M phys mem, 299M free mem, 4103M total ...
moodywoody's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
27k views

Diagnosing high CPU waiting

I have a monitoring server that is running icinga/collectd/graphite with about 50 hosts. I have noticed high load/slugging performance on the box. If you take a look at top, you'll see: Cpu(s): 0.6%...
Will's user avatar
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2 votes
2 answers
808 views

Top being high but not much processors are running on high cpu usage?

I have a machine running a very small java listener and no body is using this machine but load is like staying between 0.9 to 0.6 for nearly sometime? IS it any indication here? What could be causing ...
newbie14's user avatar
  • 149
1 vote
2 answers
9k views

ps shows that migration/* processes consume a lot of CPU, but top keep silence about them

here is the result of ps command, shown only first 10 lines ps aufx | head USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND root 2 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? S ...
OJ278's user avatar
  • 95
1 vote
1 answer
224 views

VPS Node and top -c

When using and viewing top -c with openvz does the CPU usage and everything include usage for everyone else on the system or just you? I've been watching my VPS node for awhile now and I've seen ...
Tiffany Walker's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
4k views

how to monitor select processes on centos 5.x host?

I would like to monitor a select group of processes, vmware vm's, running on my centos 6 host. "top" gives me most of what I want in that I can use -p to specify only those processes and -c to get ...
bo gusman's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
451 views

Enable foreign users processes listing

how can I enable under Debian 6 to list the processes of a foreign user? I have the user nagios but this user can only list his own processes. Br
TheFox's user avatar
  • 101
5 votes
1 answer
11k views

MongoDB virtual memory usage

I'm testing MongoDB for archives data. We have a collection with 160M rows. MongoDB instance takes 76.2 Gb virtual memory on a 12 Gb physical memory box ;-) The swap in null. I read that virtual ...
hotips's user avatar
  • 563
30 votes
2 answers
76k views

How to interpret output from Linux 'top' command?

Following a discussion made HERE about how PHP-FPM consuming memory, I just found a problem in reading the memory in top command. Here is a screenshot of my top just after restarting PHP-FPM. ...
Googlebot's user avatar
  • 1,067
1 vote
1 answer
719 views

High Steal Time utilization on Apache Linux Server

I have a CentOS "development / testing" server that runs extremely slowly. It's running Apache and Mysql using PHP. Top reports that 98% of the CPU utilization is frequently spent on "st" - Steal Time....
JMC's user avatar
  • 506
9 votes
3 answers
21k views

How to sort top result on virtual memory on Redhat Linux?

There is an interactive key "M" to sort by memory, which seems to be sorting on resident memory. Is there a way to sort on virtual memory? I happen to be working on Redhat Linux, but the question is ...
timeon's user avatar
  • 193
5 votes
1 answer
740 views

Mysterious swap usage on EC2

We're in the middle of a project to move our infrastructure from a co-lo situation into Amazon EC2 and we've noticed some weird memory characteristics of the processes in our setup. Without going into ...
rusty's user avatar
  • 163
5 votes
2 answers
5k views

top command occupied high cpu usage

My system is SUSE 10 and I observe that top occupies 57% CPU usage when I use it. I don't have too many processes: ps -eLf | wc -l 106 Here are top's stats: cat /proc/2913/stat 2913 (top) R 2879 ...
DaVid's user avatar
  • 91
-1 votes
3 answers
439 views

server not responding

The server is not responding and the top output shows the following: mysql is consuming more than 500% of CPU Will the server restart solve ths issue? Will I face the same problem after restart? # ...
shantanuo's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
196 views

why pressing M in linux's top command will have many processes that does not exist?

i pressed M in top command try to get a memory sort for the processes, 5892 myuser 15 0 88428 86M 12520 S 0.0 4.2 0:01 0 java 5893 myuser 15 0 88428 86M 12520 S 0.0 4.2 6:...
hetaoblog's user avatar
  • 249
0 votes
1 answer
3k views

memory difference on top and htop

I got a new VPS as my database server. I installed only mysql and started. After some time(even after shutting down mysql service), I see only %3-4 of the memory used in htop but according to top I ...
aykut's user avatar
  • 121
0 votes
2 answers
3k views

Get unix 'top' command output from Expect script

All, EDIT I want to execute a unix statement in Expect script and get an output without having to include the interact statement.The unix statement outputs rsize value for a process. I haven't ...
smokinguns's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
815 views

Is there a way to run top as a daemon to gather historical process data?

I am aware that I can write a cron job that will run top in batch mode and write the output to a file but I am looking for something more elegant than that. Also I am aware of sysstat (sar) but I am ...
ckliborn's user avatar
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1 vote
1 answer
2k views

How can I monitor php resources usage with top command?

There is a question that is similar to what I want to know here on server fault: How can I find exactly which PHP scripts are taking up all server resources? but I don't think any of the answers ...
Buzu's user avatar
  • 15
1 vote
2 answers
3k views

nginx+php-fpm help optimize configs

I have 3 servers. First server (CPU - model name: 06/17, 2.66GHz, 4 cores, 8GB RAM) have nginx as load balancer with next config upstream lb_mydomain { server mydomain.ru:81 weight=2; ...
Dmitro's user avatar
  • 159
1 vote
4 answers
4k views

Apache uses up a lot of CPU for small website

I have a CentOS 5.5 VPS server with 512MB RAM setup. There is 1 website hosted on it through Apache/PHP/MySQL which is built in Magento, a popular ecommerce framework. When I browse the website, it ...
fire's user avatar
  • 113
2 votes
1 answer
141 views

Our web server grinds to a halt when making XMLRPC requests. Please analyse my `top` output to see what's wrong

This a shared web server for our office and normally runs just fine with a few devs working on it simultaneously. However, I've recently started working with it using Wordpress and it's XMLRPC API ...
Matt's user avatar
  • 322

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