Fun with the top command...
The top command can give you up-to-the-second reporting of system load, memory usage,
and CPU utilization.
simply run top from the command line
$ top
Hit ? while top is running to get a list of available commands. A couple of very
useful display keys are M (which sorts on resident memory size), P (which sorts by CPU
usage again), S (to toggle cumulative runtime, that is, how long each process and all
its children have been running, in CPU seconds), and i (to stop displaying idle
processes)
as root
u key lets you filter out all processes except those owned by a given user. Follow
that up with k, which lets you interactively kill a given PID (with any signal you
like) - Can be really handy for hunting down runaway processes, and killing then from
inside top (maybe even copying and pasting the offending PID to avoid the dreaded kill
typo)
... and the best part
If you've managed a number of Linux servers, then you probably know what its like to
have several tops running in multiple windows, all competing for desktop real estate.
Why not run a process that updates the titlebar of your terminal with the current load
average regardless of what else you're running?
Save this script called tl, and save it to your ~/bin directory:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$|++;
my $host=`/bin/hostname`;
chomp $host;
while(1) {
open(LOAD, "/proc/loadavg") || die "Couldn't open /proc/loadavg: $!\n";
my @load=split(/ /, <LOAD>);
close(LOAD);
print "\033]0;";
print "$host: $load[0] $load[1] $load[2] at ", scalar(localtime);
print "\007";
sleep 2;
}
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
To see your titlebar replaced with the name, load average, and current time of the
machine you're logged into, just run tl&. It will happily go on running in the
background, even if you're running an ineractive program like vim. If you have your
titlebar already set to show the current working directory (cwd), no problem. When you
cd, the cwd is flashed momentarily, and then replaced with the time and load average
again. Need to see that directory one more time? just hit Enter on a blank line, and
it will flash again.
When finished working don't forget to killall tl before logging out. Or if you're
terminally lazy (like me), try this:
$ echo 'killall tl > /dev/null 2>&1' >> ~/.bash_logout
That will kill all of your running tl jobs on logout, without even having to lift a
finger. System administration just keeps getting easier, doesn't it?
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