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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Ubuntu high processor utilization with no identifiable processes consuming processor [duplicate]

Ubuntu host with 100% utilization in top or htop. When I inspect the running processes, I don't see a process consuming a significant amount of CPU resources. I've tried using commands like top, htop, ...
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?
2 votes
3 answers
3k views

Exclude a process from being listed in `top`

Is it possible to exclude some processes from being reported by top? For example, I would like to exclude itself from its listing (ie, I don't want top to show in the process list). I would also ...
0 votes
2 answers
769 views

linux + atop + chart alternative from atop

I use the atop in order to verify the performance top history and know by the values the status for each time my question is , what the alternative for atop that can view the values in chart? or ...
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, ...
-1 votes
1 answer
418 views

High Load Average but Low CPU Usage

I'm trying to find the cause of the high load average on our server running in RHEL 8. The top command shows that our load average for 1, 5, and 15 is more than 250+. Also, server is responsive at the ...
0 votes
0 answers
39 views

PHP-FPM process is taking too much CPU

I'm trying to understand the top command, php-fpm is taking too much %cpu but the CPU on top is always very low why is that happening, and where to start to maybe tune it?
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 ...
598 votes
4 answers
345k views

What exactly do the colors in htop status bars mean?

By default, htop shows colored status bars for processors, memory, and swap. From left to right, the bars are colored green, blue, yellow, and red depending on some thresholds. What does it mean when ...
9 votes
1 answer
793 views

Finding which process is reading from disk constantly on FreeBSD

EDIT: This ended up being a scrub process. Run zpool status -v and read the scan status for your pool clearly. I have a TrueNAS server running FreeBSD and this morning at 12 AM the disks started to be ...
3 votes
3 answers
698 views

Why is this server reporting high memory usage

It seems that given the memory percentage of the processes listed, my server should not be at 98% memory usage. Why is the cumulative memory usage so high? top - 14:34:50 up 14 days, 22:54, 3 users, ...
7 votes
2 answers
12k views

How do I change the output line length from the "top" linux command running in batch mode

The following command is useful to capture the current processes that are taking up the most CPU and store to a file: top -c -b -n 1 > top.log The -c flag is particularly useful because it gives ...
0 votes
1 answer
595 views

What does top cpu percentage include?

I have a program that reads data from shared memory and send it to a non-blocking socket in a single-threaded manner. When I'm hammering the traffic into that application, I can only see the TOP cpu ...
0 votes
1 answer
52 views

top - Show graphical load on startup (interactive commands 1, t, m)

I'd like to see the current load (cpu + mem) of my Server (rhel 7.x) in a graphical fashion and only have top (and other built-in commands) available, tools like htop (that need to be installed) are ...
0 votes
0 answers
104 views

Process Appears and Disappears Randomly in `top`

Very similar in theme to this question, but that refers specifically to high-load processes; in my case, it's a quite unobtrusive task. It's not a matter of falling off the bottom of the terminal ...
1 vote
1 answer
637 views

What does lower case "g" mean in top output?

Can someone please help explain this, I have always used to interprete the "g" in top output to be size in Gigabytes even though the convention is to use uppercase "G" but now I am ...
17 votes
5 answers
3k views

10 GB of RAM unaccounted for by top

Here's my free and smem output: danslimmon@bad-server:~$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 30147 29928 218 6 ...
0 votes
2 answers
160 views

How to use top without interactivity?

I want to periodically monitor the CPU usage and plot in time series. Not having much knowledge, I plan to use the top command, something like this question (Monitor cpu usage (and perhaps memory ...
0 votes
1 answer
495 views

Process memory-usage mismatch in a Kubernetes sidecar container

I have a sidecar container with the following resources: resources: limits: memory: 512Mi requests: memory: 64Mi However, when I run top, I see this: envoy & pilot-agent seem to be ...
1 vote
2 answers
724 views

How to tell threads from processes in top and ps on Linux?

I find it quite confusing to differentiate threads and processes when I run top and then press H or run ps -Hef. I know that they share the same attributes, which makes them similar but was wondering ...
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

Using `top` command shows PHP FPM processes using more memory than available

I've read this answer about understanding top, as well as man top, but I think I still have trouble turning the presented data from top into actual information. I'm logged on an Amazon EC2 instance ...
6 votes
2 answers
3k views

How does docker stats output relate to top output?

I've got a process running in a Docker container on Linux, with a 2GByte memory limit. (The container is started with docker run --memory=2g.) Here is what top says about it after it's been running ...
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 ...
4 votes
3 answers
13k views

Identify processes running inside Docker, in Process List

I realize that processes that run inside Docker containers appear on the hosts' process list: # ps aux | grep mariadb root 12486 0.0 0.0 112812 976 pts/0 S+ 14:47 0:00 grep --color=auto ...
1 vote
2 answers
3k views

How much of my memory is actually used?

I have a VPS with 8 GB of memory running mainly docker containers. When I go to the cloud monitoring service provided by my provider, I see that ~10% of the RAM is used. I don't understand how this ...
149 votes
6 answers
167k views

Show full process name in top

I'm running a Rails stack on Ubuntu. When I call ps -AF, I get a descriptive process name set by the Apache module like 00:00:43 Rails: /var/www... which is really helpful in diagnosing load issues. ...
7 votes
2 answers
4k views

Identify which process is responsible for heavy disk i/o under FreeBSD

I wonder how I can monitor which process takes out all my IO bandwith. The only command i know is gstat but it shows cumulative info. Is there any tools i can use to inspect the running processes for ...
-1 votes
1 answer
231 views

What is the Path API for kubectl top pods

I use this command "kubectl top pods" using Kubectl command I need path api for this command I need return data from this command "kubectl top pods" via api
0 votes
0 answers
79 views

Confusing Memory output from top/ps aux (over 600% memory allocated)

I'm trying to get to the bottom of an issue where the oom-killer is killing certain jobs off on a server. The server has 48GB of physical ram, with 20GB of swap, and I'm trying to find out what ...
34 votes
5 answers
32k views

What does %st mean in top?

Here is an example from my top: Cpu(s): 6.0%us, 3.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 78.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 12.0%st I am trying to figure out the significance of the %st field. I read that it means steal ...
1 vote
0 answers
1k views

Memory not available but no process is using it

We are using a centos 7 server. The free -m command has the following output. [root@211 ~]# free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 31841 ...
176 votes
7 answers
356k views

What does Virtual memory size in top mean?

I am running top to monitor my server performance and 2 of my java processes show virtual memory of up to 800MB-1GB. Is that a bad thing? What does virtual memory mean? And oh btw, I have swap of ...
0 votes
1 answer
128 views

Unknown process on Centos 7 VPS "sysnetd" using lots of cpu

So I cant seem to find any information ANYWHERE on what this process, "sysnetd", does. I've run LSOF etc but nothing seems to provide any info I know what to do with. The /proc/pid folder ...
0 votes
1 answer
305 views

lsb_release called every few seconds

I have an odroid XU4 running the manufacturer-provided minimal Ubuntu 18.04. Every few seconds (it's not really consistent, but think between 5 and 30) I get a call to lsb_release. Sometimes it gets ...
0 votes
0 answers
476 views

High I/O wait in apache tomcat server

Facing high I/O wait in apache tomcat server when the load increases. Suspecting disk I/O is less when tomcat is running however. disk IO seems drops drastically when tomcat is running along with the ...
9 votes
5 answers
11k views

How do I list processes in htop by just their name, without the full path?

Is there a way to have the list of processes in htop only display as the name of the command, rather than the full pathname w/ flags?
5 votes
2 answers
4k views

100% CPU usage reported, but no processes using the CPU

I am running Debian 10 (kernel 4.19.0-18-amd64) on bare metal and I have recently noticed strange CPU usage. Screenshot of htop, sorted by CPU% Screenshot of top, sorted by CPU% As you can see, 100% ...
1 vote
1 answer
1k views

When using atop as a systemd service it only runs and logs to file once

I am on CentOS 7 and using atop v2.6.0 If I run atop manually with the following command everything runs as expected and the log is written to every 10 seconds: /usr/bin/atop -w /var/log/atop/...
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 ...
36 votes
8 answers
149k views

wa (Waiting for I/O) from top command is big

I have a forum with a lot of visitors, Some days the load increase to reach 40 without increase of the number vistors. As you can see from the below output, the waiting time is high (57%). how do I ...
0 votes
1 answer
322 views

Centos 7 server performance problems. High load

I have a Centos 7 VPS at HostGator that has been very slow lately. HostGator have not been overly helpful in diagnosing the problem, insisting that everything is ok. The server is a 4 core VPS with ...
1 vote
1 answer
777 views

How to view the vhost associated with an apache process

Using the "top" command (or a similar command) in Linux, is there anyway to show the vhost that an apache process is associated with in /var/www/html? I have 250 websites on a linux server, ...
0 votes
1 answer
953 views

Why atop shows high CPU but sum of individual processes %CPU far smaller?

How can the sum of processes' CPU-% usage be lower than the total CPU load, according to atop and top, please? I have a CPU reaching very high load (87%, for several hours) even though the sum of the ...
0 votes
0 answers
28 views

Where is my memory being consumed? [duplicate]

I have a Ubuntu 20.04 server which is reporting relatively low free RAM: top - 11:28:31 up 5 days, 20:12, 3 users, load average: 0.18, 0.26, 0.27 Tasks: 268 total, 1 running, 267 sleeping, 0 ...
0 votes
1 answer
96 views

Which one is the cache value in the output of top?

On the book I'm reading, DevOps Troubleshooting, it says that the last value in the swap line is the memory used for file caches (yellow) in Linux so subtracting it to the used memory (green) gives ...
2 votes
1 answer
2k views

Solaris 10 top more free memory than real

When I type TOP command in my server I get result: CPU states: 79.3% idle, 9.2% user, 11.6% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap Memory: 16G real, 19G free, 283G swap in use, 115G swap free I don't ...
0 votes
5 answers
2k views

Hiding other users' processes on top

I'm running a Debian server and giving out shell access for a handful of friends. I'd like to hide the running processes from those normal users, so that for example top only shows their own processes,...
0 votes
1 answer
865 views

Centos 7 - High Load, low CPU, low IO wait, no processed maked as D

I've got a CentOS 7 VM which seems to be stuck with quite high load (8-10). CPU usage is around 25%, there is no IO wait and there are no processes marked as D in top. I've been looking around as much ...
2 votes
3 answers
18k views

CentOS7 kswapd0 process eating 99% CPU

When I run top on centos7, I found kswapd0 eating 99% CPU, as shown in the screenshot above. Below is some other information top - 11:38:04 up 32 days, 16:14, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.13, 0....
0 votes
1 answer
1k views

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 ...

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