Monitoring servers with Htop

Hi guys,

today I'm gonna share with you a little tool that I used to use to inspect my memory usage and processes on my servers.

The common way to do this kind of thing is using top, free and ps but htop proved to be more efficient and user friendly then the others.

I'm currently using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on my servers, so to install the htop command you just need to perform:

sudo apt-get install htop

It's done!

Now, a little screenshot to present you the htop interface:

As you can see in the image above, we got a lot of information in a single screen, in my case I setup my screen to present each processor core and the average loading on the left, followed by the memory usage and swap. This is almost the default screen.

On the right side, I put a clock, tasks counter, Load Average status, uptime and hostname.

These Htop meters are customizables, so pressing F2, or clicking on setup you can choose what goes in the both side of the screen.

This tool help me a lot to kill processes that are consuming a lot of memory or cpu, and some cases is easier to find a process using the htop's search than using ps, and this is very helpful.

I hope you enjoy the tip.

Chreers.