I run a process which demands a lot of CPU power, which causes a spike in the 1-minute load average. The graph below shows the 1, 5 and 15 minute load averages on my (4-CPU) Linux desktop, when I run a load test. You get a set of 3 figures, which show the average system load, over the last 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes: It is taken by looking at tasks that are running on the CPU, and those that are waiting to run. It’s a measure of how busy the system is. The load average is the figure at the top right of top. Memory and swap Advertisements 📈 Load average What do they all mean? Let’s dive and try to decipher each set of numbers: In this article, we’ll focus on the overall system health stats in the top section. The second section shows the table of processes (hence the name top!) The first section of the screen shows your server stats: server load, CPU, memory usage and your number of tasks or processes. The toppermost of the poppermost: output from the top command When you run top, you should see output that looks something like this:

But, if you need to install it yourself for some reason, you can find it in the package procps-ng (on Fedora and RHEL). Top is fairly ubuqitous, so you should find it on most Linux systems. To start top, just type top in a terminal.

If you want to get a rough idea of the CPU and memory usage of your system, or see a list of the top processes and programs currently running, run top. The top program is one of the main system and process monitoring commands on Linux. Linux for DevOps: What you need to know Advertisements What is ‘top’?.45 Linux Commands for Beginners: All the top commands on one page.It’s like a Linux command-line equivalent of Windows Task Manager. Top is the first tool I turn to, when I need to investigate a performance issue in Linux. If you want to figure out how overworked (or underworked!) your Linux server is, then dive right into this. This is my complete guide to understanding the plethora of CPU, memory and load stats that you can get from your Linux server, using the top command.

Linux cpu usage by process