
Here's an atop screenshot showing a system during disk-utilization stress. Both utilities share the same system-data snapshot database. atop also provides a utility atopsar which is similar to traditional Unix sar. This allows you to go back in time later to investigate issues. atop is similar to programs like top or htop, with the notable difference that it runs a periodic cron job to generate & preserve full process & system activity data. This list includes various details about each process and is refreshed automatically every 5 seconds.A more graphical way to capture past activity by system-state snapshoting continuously, is to use atop. The top command generates a list of processes sorted by the parameter %CPU, or percentage of CPU consumed by a process. You can calculate the overall CPU utilization using the idle time using the formula given below:įor example, in the output above, the idle time is 98.3%, so the CPU utilization can be calculated as follows: In the output above, the top command displays various important CPU statistics, including idle time and wait time. It is one of the most widely used commands for tracking the CPU utilization, process statistics, and memory utilization of a Linux system.įor example, running the top command on a Linux system will display an output similar to the one shown below: Fig 1: Output of top command It displays various crucial system metrics along with a set of processes that are currently being managed by the Linux kernel. The top command is used to display a real-time, dynamic view of a running system.

These are often invisible and heavily utilize the CPU. If a system becomes extremely slow with a CPU usage of nearly 100%-but with no clear cause-the problem may be a virus or malware. Too many background processes running simultaneously on a computer consume CPU resources and unnecessarily cause high CPU usage. Autostart programs and background processesĪutostart programs are applications that are launched automatically when booting the operating system and they continue to run in the background.


If the idle process is taking up to 99% of the CPU's power, it means only 1% is being used to run actual tasks.Ģ. This process appears to show high CPU usage, but it actually indicates the percentage of CPU capacity not being used. If a system is idle, the OS creates a process called the System Idle Process to prevent the system from shutting off. Higher than average CPU usage can often be attributed to one of the following causes: 1. Since high CPU utilization indicates poor system performance, it should be avoided.
