htop explanation

htop is an interactive process viewer and system monitor. It's one of my favorite linux tools that I use regularly to monitor system resources. If you take top and put it on steroids, you get htop. htop has an awesome visual interface that you can also interact with using your keyboard.

1. What is Htop?
2. How do you read Htop?
3. What does Htop load average mean?
4. What do Htop colors mean?
5. What is difference between top and Htop?
6. How do I leave Htop?
7. Why does Htop show multiple processes?
8. What is memory in Htop?
9. What does D mean in Htop?
10. What is a good load average?
11. What load average is too high?
12. How do you sort memory by top command?

What is Htop?

htop is an interactive system-monitor process-viewer and process-manager. ... htop uses color and gives visual information about processor, swap and memory status. htop can also display the processes as a tree. Users often deploy htop in cases where Unix top does not provide enough information about the system's processes.

How do you read Htop?

Understanding CPU Usage in htop

1. Blue: Display percentage of CPU used by low priority processes. ( ...
2. Green: Displays percentage of CPU used for processes owned by normal users.
3. Red: Displays percentage of CPU used by system processes.
4. Orange: Displays percentage of CPU used by IRQ time.

What does Htop load average mean?

Load Average. It is the average of computational work performed by CPU. 1.0 on a single core CPU would mean 100 percent utilization, similarly, 2.0 on a dual-core CPU represents 100% CPU usage. The load average contains three values.

What do Htop colors mean?

Press h inside htop for quick help. CPU Blue : Low-priority threads Green : Normal priority threads Red : Kernel threads Turquoise : Virtualization threads. Memory Green : Used memory Blue : Buffers Yellow/Orange : Cache.

What is difference between top and Htop?

top is the default command-line utility that comes pre-installed on Linux distributions and Unix-like operating systems. ... htop is interactive process-viewer and process-manager for Linux and Unix-like operating system based on ncurses. If you take top and put it on steroids, you get htop.

How do I leave Htop?

Basically Ctrl + c sends the SIGINT (interrupt) signal, ; by default, this causes the process to terminate. Just like top , htop can be quit by pressing Q . Show activity on this post. TL;DR The standard way to quit htop is F10 or q .

Why does Htop show multiple processes?

htop shows individual threads as separate processes by default, similarly to how ps -AL would. If you press capital H it will switch to only showing the main processes (pressing it again switches back). Each thread's summary information actually reflects the whole process, so they don't have separate memory counts etc.

What is memory in Htop?

The memory meter in htop says a low number, such as 9%, when top shows something like 90%! ... The number showed by the memory meter is the total memory used by processes. The additional available memory is used by the Linux kernel for buffering and disk cache, so in total almost the entire memory is in use by the kernel.

What does D mean in Htop?

D state code means that process is in uninterruptible sleep.

What is a good load average?

Reading load averages

Usually, it's fine if the load average is above 1.0 per core in the last minute mark, but elevated load in the five or fifteen-minute averages could indicate a problem.

What load average is too high?

The "Need to Look into it" Rule of Thumb: 0.70 If your load average is staying above > 0.70, it's time to investigate before things get worse. The "Fix this now" Rule of Thumb: 1.00. If your load average stays above 1.00, find the problem and fix it now.

How do you sort memory by top command?

9 Answers

1. press shift + m after running the top command.
2. or you can interactively choose which column to sort on. press Shift + f to enter the interactive menu. press the up or down arrow until the %MEM choice is highlighted. press s to select %MEM choice. press enter to save your selection.