If you want a quick view of a Linux system’s process load, you can use top or — slightly nicer — htop. But what if you want a quick snapshot of how the disk system is doing? There are a few tools you can use, some of which are not nearly as common as top.
Most similar to top is iotop. This program shows you the total and current disk read and write numbers for the file system and also shows you who is eating up the most disk I/O. This screen looks busy:
If you want to know exactly what’s going on in your Linux system, some of you might reach for top. For the connoisseur of system monitors, nothing less than htop will do. Not familiar with htop? [Umer Mansoor] did a beautiful job of explaining it graphically.
We’ve mentioned htop in a previous Linux Fu, but we’ve never gotten a chance to dig into it. And now, we don’t have to. Like top, the htop program is still text-based, but it has a much nicer interface with colors, and easier way to send signals to processes, and support for tree displays. You can even use the mouse with it if you want to.
[Umer] did a lot of work to take screenshots of htop at work and annotate them. Sure, you could read the man page, but we think this is a lot better.
Of course, there are other improvements to top. Glances is pretty interesting, for example. For serious system administration help, you can try Webmin or Cockpit.
