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read the transcript!
top
a live-updating summary of the top users of your system’s resources:
sad little stick person: who’s using all my memory
top: chrome, obv!
let’s explain some numbers in top!
load average
3 numbers that roughly reflect demand for your CUs on the system in the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.
if it’s higher than the # of CPUs you have, that’s often bad!
memory
4 numbers: total/free/used/cached
One perhaps unexpected thing: total is NOT free+ used!
total = free + used + cached (filesystem cache)
% CPU
confused stick figure with hair sticking out: 350%? what?
this column is given as the % of a single core. If you have 4 cores, this can go up to 400%!
RES
this column is the “resident set size”, aka how much RAM your process is using.
SHR is how much of the RES is shared with other processes
htop
a prettier & more interactive version of top
Illustration of a graph showing different users of system resources with graphs showing used and cached memory in different colours.