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Htop
Is a very interactive tui based tool written in C program(using the ncurses library) by Hisham Muhammad with a group of code contributors. Basically htop was written to replace the standard top tool in unix/linux operating system. Htop provides a full list of processes running, instead of the top resource-consuming processes. Htop uses color and gives visual information about processor, swap and memory status
Various Htop features over the standard top command.
- when trying to find minor memory leaks in applications. Compared to top, it provides a more convenient, cursor-controlled interface for killing processes.
- In ‘htop’ you can scroll the list vertically and horizontally to see all processes and complete command lines.
- In ‘top’ you are subject to a delay for each unassigned key you press (especially annoying when multi-key escape sequences are triggered by accident).
- ‘htop’ starts faster (‘top’ seems to collect data for a while before displaying anything).
- In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number to kill a process, in ‘top’ you do.
- In ‘htop’ you don’t need to type the process number or the priority value to renice a process, in ‘top’ you do.
- ‘htop’ supports mouse operation, ‘top’ doesn’t
- ‘top’ is older, hence, more used and tested.
- Configuring/monitoring using CPU affinity
- Tree view, SMP, and other features available
- An impressive setup — htop running on a machine with 128 cores and 1TB of RAM
Installing htop
Htop rpm can be found at http://packages.sw.be/htop/ . Make sure you have downloaded the right version/arch of htop rpm available on the list. For example to install htop on centos 4 32 bit :
- cd /usr/src/
- wget http://rpmforge.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/htop-0.8.3-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
- rpm -ivh htop-0.8.3-1.el4.rf.i386.rpm
- Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
- 1:htop ########################################### [100%]
execute the command htop from your shell and that’s it you are done.
Installing htop from source
Download the htop source from : http://sourceforge.net/projects/htop/
- cd /usr/src/
- wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/htop/htop/0.8.3/htop-0.8.3.tar.gz?r=http%3A%2F%2Fsourceforge.net%2Fprojects%2Fhtop%2F&ts=1283665168&use_mirror=cdnetworks-kr-2
- tar zxvf htop-0.8.3.tar.gz
- cd htop-0.8.3
- ./configure
- If you are getting the following error message make sure that you have the ncurses-devel package installed (yum install ncurses-devel)
- configure: error: missing headers: curses.h
- make all
- make install
This will install the htop binary in /usr/local/bin/htop .
Run the command htop from shell to monitor the system process.
Some useful htop tips :
To set the delay time (in seconds before starting the command) : htop -d <your refesh limit in seconds)
To list only the specific user in the system try -u for exampe : htop -u apache (will list only the process run by the apache user)
Find out the htop help menu by pressing the F1 key after executing the htop command from the command line for more help refer ‘ man help ‘. Cheers!
Htop
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