Debian Admin

Debian/Ubuntu Linux System Administration Tutorials,Howtos,Tips

  • RSS Subscribe

    subscribe to the Debian Admin RSS feed
  • Sponsors



  • Categories

  • Sponsors

  • Support DebianAdmin

    Amount $:
    Website(Optional):


  • Meta

  • Archives



Display top CPU processes Using htop

Posted by Admin on December 27th, 2006

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

htop is a very competent interactive process viewer for the shell, providing all the functionality – and more – that the top utility does, in an easier and more intuitive way. htop provides easy-to-use menus for most operations and also has support for using a mouse.

htop is an easier to use and friendlier version of top. While it hasn’t as much time behind it and therefore is less tested, it seems to work very well both locally and over SSH, and it’s well worth taking it for a spin. It’s just one of those small utilities that makes life a bit easier.

Install htop in debian

#apt-get install htop

This will complete the installation.Now if you want to check this application just type the following command from your terminal

#htop

You should see the following screen


If you want to know about the more available option check htop man page

Comparison between htop and top

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.

  • Share/Bookmark

3 Responses to “Display top CPU processes Using htop”

  1. it-partizan Says:

    Thank you for a nice article, htop is realy very nice and more user friendly.

    Now it will be my process viewer of choise (after ps, ofcource:))

  2. Iman Says:

    It is so useful tool, I was using ps aux previously, that was so hard!

  3. Fausto Says:

    Nice tip. Thank you.

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>