The top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display system summary information as well as a list of tasks currently being managed by the Linux kernel. The types of system summary information shown and the types, order and size of information displayed for tasks are all user configurable and that configuration can be made persistent across restarts.
The program provides a limited interactive interface for process manipulation as well as a much more extensive interface for personal configuration -- encompassing every aspect of its operation. And while top is referred to throughout this document, you are free to name the program anything you wish. That new name, possibly an alias, will then be reflected on top's display and used when reading and writing a configuration file.
top -hv | -abcHimMsS -d delay -n iterations -p pid [, pid ...]
[root@server1 ~]# top
top - 14:53:28 up 6 days, 14:08, 1 user, load average: 0.06, 0.05, 0.01
Tasks: 131 total, 1 running, 130 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1021964k total, 965568k used, 56396k free, 171436k buffers
Swap: 2064376k total, 0k used, 2064376k free, 561180k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1632 mysql 20 0 132m 12m 2016 S 0.3 1.2 4:55.92 mysqld
1 root 20 0 2900 1300 1072 S 0.0 0.1 0:04.18 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.10 kthreadd
3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.21 ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.90 watchdog/0
7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:34.80 events/0
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cgroup
9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 async/mgr
12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 pm
13 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.66 sync_supers
14 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.53 bdi-default
15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/0
16 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:09.35 kblockd/0
17 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
18 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify
19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_hotplug
20 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
21 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux
22 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd
........