Question: Reading the Output of Top

[Willem van der Walt]

I usually just want to know how busy the machine is, so then I use uptime.
To check if the machine is swapping, I  just use the free command.
HTH, Willem


On Sat, 7 May 2016, Tony Baechler wrote:

> On 5/7/2016 4:24 AM, Parham Doustdar wrote:
>> Top is unusable without such a feature, but you and other people replying 
> to
>> this thread seem to be using it just fine. So, what tricks do people use in
>> order to memorize what column is for what value? I have this problem when
>> reading the output of commands like |free -m|, too.
>
>
> Well, I just listen very carefully. I've not had a problem with it, but I 
> see what you mean with top in particular. It's hard to know what's going on 
> when you hear a bunch of numbers scrolling past. That's why I suggested 
> parking the cursor, but that doesn't stop the output. I would suggest "top 
> -n1" to only show the information once or increase the refresh rate as John 
> suggests.
>
> Regarding free memory, I cheat. You can actually do this with top and most 
> other commands. In Linux, there is a special filesystem called /proc. It's 
> worth exploring some time as you can learn lots of useful information. All 
> top, ps, free and lots of other commands do is reformat the output of files 
> under /proc to make them look nicer. I don't know what files top uses, but 
> read the man page. For fun, try the following two commands and let us know 
> what you think:
>
> cat /proc/meminfo
> less /proc/cpuinfo
>
> You can do the same with the ps command. All ps does on Linux is go through 
> /proc and print out the process names, memory and CPU usage, etc. I find ps 
> more useful and easier though, especially when there are hundreds of running 
> processes on most servers.
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