‘Top’ Linux System Monitoring Tool
It’s Simple To Use!
To run ‘Top’, you can open terminal and then type “top” without quotation marks and press return. It will show you all the processes running in the background. You will notice that the table in the terminal you have is being updated every three seconds and you can change that interval time by pressing save “s” without quotation marks and it will let you enter the number. This number is actually a time interval in seconds that you can enter and it will change the interval.
How To Kill A Process Using Top?
You will see a long list of processes that are running in the background. You can press “i” without quotation marks and it will hide all the processes that are not using your CPU. Now you have only CPU hungry processes in front of you. In case you like to kill any process you need to look at the PID number. This number is a process ID which you can use to kill it. You can see the process in the very last column in the table and then make a note of PID.
Once you know the PID, you can press “k” without quotation marks and then type PID and hit return twice. You will see that the process will be killed.