Linux Process Monitoring: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using htop

Installing and Running htop

• 💡 To monitor processes on Linux, the htop command is recommended, but it often requires installation.
• 🛠️ Installation can be done using sudo apt install htop or a similar command depending on your distribution.
• 🚀 Once installed, you can run htop in the terminal to view all active processes.

Understanding the htop Interface

• 📊 The htop interface displays key information for each process, including Process ID (PID), Username (USER), CPU usage, Memory usage (MEM), Process execution time (TIME), and the Command (CMD).
• 📌 Other columns like priority and process status are also available.

Navigating and Managing Processes

• 🔍 Use F3 to search for specific processes by name, allowing you to filter the displayed list.
• 🌳 The Tree view (accessible via F5 or similar) helps visualize parent-child relationships between processes.
• ⚙️ F6 allows sorting processes by various criteria such as CPU usage, memory usage, PID, or username.
• ⚖️ You can adjust the niceness of a process (its priority) to influence how it's treated by the CPU scheduler.
• 💀 F9 is used to kill a process, which can be necessary for terminating unresponsive or unwanted applications.
• 🚪 Press F10 to quit htop and return to the command line.