In this recipe, we are going to use the top command to find the processes that are using a lot of CPU resources.
The top command is a Linux-based utility and it does not work in Unix-based systems. If you are using Solaris then use the prstat
command instead to find CPU intensive processes.
The usage of the top command is shown in the following snippet:
bash-3.2$top
Cpu states: 0.0% idle, 82.0% user, 18.7% kernel, 0.8% wait, 0.5% swap
Memory: 795M real, 12M free, 318M swap, 1586M free swap
PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND
23624 postgres -25 2 208M 4980K cpu 1:20 22.47% 94.43% postgres
15811 root -15 4 2372K 716K sleep 22:19 0.61% 3.81% java
20435 admin 33 0 207M 2340K sleep 2:47 0.23% 1.14% postgres
20440 admin 33 0 93M 2300K sleep 2:28 0.23% 1.14% postgres
23698 root 33 0 2052K 1584K cpu 0:00 0.23% 0.95% top
23621 admin 27 2 5080K 3420K sleep...