I was this close )( to posting a comment on Ezee Talk about "why not make a video about HTOP?" and then I thought "Joe Collins has made so many videos that answered so many questions..." RU-vid search...and here it is. And, once again, it answered so many questions! Thank you!
Joe, thanks for bringing my attention to the useful features of htop. I have had it installed for some time already but never really use it. But this morning I needed to stop all my Chrome processes, which was like 7 or 8 processes. I would have normally kill it one at a time from terminal which is very tedious and painful. But then I remembered htop filter feature you mentioned in the video. So I called up htop and filter out all the Chrome processes. From the tree view I can see that they all go back to one single process. So I just kill that parent process and that took care of the others. And it was so easy killing process graphically with htop. Don't need to ps for the pid and then kill -SIGTERM pid. Just highlight the process and F9 and select the signal to send the process. It was a breeze. Thank you very much.
I have always thought of a process as: _a program in execution_ . Like, if you write a program to compute first 100 primes for example and compile it. Before you actually run it then it is not a process and wouldn’t show up in htop. It is not using memory nor CPU (resources). Only resource it uses is disk space. But when you do run it then it becomes a process. You can now find on htop and it is now taking up memory and CPU. For my fellow Mac Users your GUI version of this is Activity Monitor.
Thanks for this!! Just installed it and it's a lot better than the standard Terminal and xterm. I have been using Yakuake too and I like it but Htop is a lot better and so much more control.
I thought the program was meant to be like Windows task manager but flashier, I see the use I've been looking for now. Thanks for the eye opening illustration, wanted to ask about that but since you stated you don't read comments I dismissed it.
I had no idea there was htop - I have been using top forever, but htop looks better for sure. My computer acts as the DVR for the house, so some shows I render down to mp4 to show up on our Roku's and use nice for that transcoding... but how handy to "renice" on the fly like that if a process is starting to take over. Great job, Joe!
I am still a newbie and in the 4 months I have tinkered with Linux distros, I have not yet given any thought to htop until today. So the first thing that I did was go to RU-vid and look for one of your videos. I watched this with the June 27th release of AntiX-16 running on my SSD. I have a fancy mini-ITX computer with i7 6700k ( which I can only guess is over-kill for any Linux distro ? ) and I have 16 GB of fast DDR4 ( but no graphics card, yet ). I just took a look at htop, and it is hard to see the computer even knows AntiX is running at all. 8 threads are shown. Each varies from 0.0 % to 0.5 % with occasional spikes on Thread Number 2 varies from 0.8 % to a max of 2.0 %. Thread Numbers 5, 6, & 7 are almost always zero with spikes up to 0.5 on 6 & 7 and 0.9 on # 5. And that is just with RU-vid running via FireFox 45 ESR. Anyways, I better rush out and get me a water-cooler for my CPU. LOL ! On a related note, I think my new ASUS Impact motherboard has had no issues with Linux since I built the computer 4 months ago. I have not yet tested the U2 bus on the motherboard for the new Intel SSD's, nor the Type C USB or the 3.1 USB, or the graphics card slot. Every Linux distro I have tried, ( Mint 17.3 & 18, Ubuntu Gnome 16.10, Manjaro 16.08, ChaletOs, SlackEx, ExTiX, Korora 24, and AntiX and a few others ) the components of the motherboard worked out of the box. I have been on AntiX for several hours today, and no issues. I like the system information function which gives a very detailed look at the hardware. I haven't found a similar thing in other distros yet. Still having fun with Linux, and can see the light at the end of the tunnel, that I will no longer be a newbie. ( Meaning, I haven't yet tried Deepin or Peppermint 7, or spent much time messing with printers, and no time messing with graphics cards, and have only installed distros on this one computer )
I had always only used top. I find the Htop colors hard to see. Also, I didn't know how to get the options to work. Because the F keys d were confusing. After watching this video I had another look and the reason I had problems was because my linux has the F keys already asigned. For instance F1 does not trigger the Htop help, it triggers the linux help. So I decided to try it in a separate TTY ctrl-alt-F1 and it works fine in there. There is also a graphical Task Manager, which is also quite nice. Depending on what a person can get running.
Hi Joe, last week I was playing around with Htop and was wondering how you can use htop to monitor your system over a period of time with a certain time interval? I saw some screen shots of somebody monitoring his server between 8am and 10 am with an interval of 10 min. do you know how this can be done? I started learning and using Linux for 1 year know and most things I could find online, but this I cannot find. I verry much love you Linux videos. I'm currently running Linux Mint 17.3 on a 10 year old Dell machine. Works fine for me.
Thanks for the great information Joe. Quick question: I am unable to access the Filter feature. I see "Invert" instead of "Filter" for F4. Is there a way to change this? I am using GNOME 2.28.2.
So, I know how htop works but one thing really bothers me is even though it is consuming 1GB or 8GB ram you can clearly see the bars on it's left are at full. Why is that? This really bothers me and I can't seem to figure it out why
joe im rendering a video, a BIG one and my laptop gets to 190F i set the Nice to 19 but it still gets to 190 how can i get it to go lower or to use less CPU ?
correction on this video im trying to render all processor are about 100% and thats with Nice at 19 and the gnome monitor very low priority but other videos are about 50% and one about 100%
That is stumpier because I don't know the program. Look in the configuration and see if there's a way to limit CPU usage. Sometimes you can put a cap on it so the machine won't run as hard but it will take longer, of coarse. :)
is there any way to know what process is crashing constantly? thanks and nice video. btw im using my iphone X running htop and making it more stable and look for errors, i started using cocoatop for iphone but htop is more detailed
Its funny cause I just installed this yesterday.... also there is powertop in the repos too. In my Linux netbook, I got a dual core AMD E-350 APU and Mint runs quite "nicely" on it.
+Miguel Sensacion All of the engineers I've heard talk about swap say you really need to have it no matter what OS you're running. There are some programs that use it and the system uses it to dump memory when it hibernates. You can adjust the 'swappiness' in Linux to make the system only use swap when it desperately needs it. I always make a swap partition or use a swap file. :)
+Joe Collins, I've always set up a swapfile for use in Linux and for some reason it's not being used at all. I've got about 7.5 gigabytes of system memory and there are moments when I do notice some lag but mostly delays when I'm starting something like VLC Player. I've actually tried adjusting and correcting the space with gparted but still no results.
+Jefferson Grindle If you run System Monitor or Htop does it show the swap space as being available? If not, it may mean that the system is not mounting it and you'll have to edit your fstab file so it can find it. If it does show it as being available and it's just not putting anything in there. That might mean that you're just not using all that much memory. My machine with 8 GB's of ram never, ever uses the swap space at all. I have never seen it do it in 5 years. :)
+Joe Collins I think that the system isn't mounting it. I checked it by going sudo in the terminal and running gparted. It's there as I created it but it's not being mounted by the system. I thought about resizing it because it's only 4G so I'll have to edit my fstab file. I'm not really versed yet on the file editing although I can do it, I just need some specific direction on what to do.
