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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.apps Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!news.csuohio.edu!stever From: stever@csuohio.edu (Steve Ratliff) Subject: Re: Top - what is it and do I need it? Message-ID: <1994Jan10.184623.16915@news.csuohio.edu> Sender: news@news.csuohio.edu (USENET News System) Organization: Cleveland State University X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL5 References: <CJBFJz.3L1@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> Date: Mon, 10 Jan 1994 18:46:23 GMT Lines: 25 Jim Pitts (pitts@mimosa.astro.indiana.edu) wrote: : In article <tmcCJAqoB.5L@netcom.com>, Tom Crockett <tmc@netcom.com> wrote: : >Occasionally I've seen references to what must be a system mgt. : >tool named 'top'. archie -s top returns lots of getopts :) but : >not top. : : 'top' is indeed a handy tool. It gives you a real time breakdown on the : consumption and use of system resources. It has given most of the *BSD : packages nothing but trouble getting it ported to their particular systems. : : FreeBSD has 'top' on FreeBSD.cdrom.com in the pub/FreeBSD/packages directory. : It works very well for me. There is both a binary and source package : there. :[sig deleted] Be warned that the binary and source packages of top on FreeBSD.cdrom.com currently have a rather substantial memory leak. Top will grow in size about 30-40k every time that a new process is started or exits. So don't run top for extended periods of time, especially on a very busy system. Top will hang your system after it gets to big. On my not very busy system, it locks the system up after it has been running for about 24 hours. I do not know if this applies to the NetBSD available source as well. There doesn't seem to be any problem if you only run top for several minutes at a time. You can actually use top itself to watch the memory leak in action. :)