Terminal Tips: Monitor System Performance with Top

You can drop top's resorce usage quite a bit by running "top -FRu" which eliminates the RPRVT and RSHRD stats and also doesn't report on shared lib usage, but cuts resource use from about 15% on my system to about 2%. I'm guessing Linux's top is faster either because it doesn't report that kind of information by defualt, or because the kernel keeps that information in a handier form for top's use (which may or may not be more handy for the kernel's use!). I beleve top is faster in FreeBSD as well, but FreeBSD's doesn't report RPRVT or RSHRD, or a bunch of other stuff OSX's does.

Kristen (Post 8) - If you type "man top" at the command line it will bring up the manual for top. There are explanations of data that top displays.

I'm not sure why top itself should be such a resource hog for you - running it one of the linux boxes here shows it using 0.1%

Anyone know of a good tutorial that explains what all that stuff in top means?

What's the difference between top and OSX's Activity Monitor's window? If users are *nix illiterate, this might be easier and less scary.

When running top on linux, I've always noticed that top seems to consume a relatively large amount of system resources, so I avoid leaving it running.

Is there a differences between the 'top' binary used in OSX versus Linux? When I run top on my Mac it usually shows top taking 12-14 percent of the cpu. Even the screenshot shows top using 21.4%. When I run top on my linux box it doesn't even appear in the list.

I've been using top since getting my iBook a month ago. It's great having the beautiful OS X GUI on top of rock solid UNIX. Chris http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

If you really want to find that system hog try using "top -u". This sorts the processes by cpu usage and the top offenders will be listed first.

Thanks, Scott. Added it. I don't know why I always go the interrupt route...