TOP and TOPAZ are Unix, Linux and AIX utilities that provides real time display of top cpu using processes.

As a server/systems administrator you will find the TOP utility very useful to determine top cpu using processes. TOP is the utility for Linux and most Unix operating systems. IBM Aix has it’s own version which does the same job, it is called Topaz.

Top can be download from unixtop.org, the documentation are also avaiable from this site. With Top you can also find out which account is responsible for utilizing the most cpu resources, and for how long the process has been running. It provides a real time snapshot of the running processes.

Microsoft Windows has the graphical version which is called Task Manager. To access task manager right click on the task bar, and select task manager.

Below is a snapshot of the Top display.

Mem: 2074120k total, 1290556k used, 783564k free, 91940k buffers
Swap: 4064312k total, 0k used, 4064312k free, 650100k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3093 root 15 0 154m 52m 19m S 6.3 2.6 2:08.97 firefox-bin
13423 apache 15 0 37636 20m 9m S 6.0 1.0 0:01.89 httpd
2586 mysql 16 0 138m 28m 4020 S 4.7 1.4 69:12.06 mysqld

About Andrew Lin

Hi, I have always wanted to creat a blog site but never had the time. I have been working in Information Technology for over 15 years. I specialize mainly in networks and server technologies and dabble a little with the programming aspects. Andrew Lin

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