Awesome way to improve process monitoring: Install htop Linux on RHEL, Ubuntu and fedora.

If you are a regular Linux user or sysadmin you must be using top utility for process monitoring. Which is a simple utility , If you are bored with top utility. There is a colourful yet interactive utility in Linux, called as “htop”. This post will quickly guide you about how to install htop Linux and perform process monitoring using htop Linux.

Htop is an interactive real-time process monitoring utility or command for Linux.

It’s very similar to native top utility in Linux however with htop utility you can move or scroll horizontally or vertically to capture all the details about the process.

Features of htop linux utlity:

1. It’s an colourful utility meaning that, it displays data by indicating colour. E.g. If the CPU utilisation is high then it displays Red colour as below:
2. Highly interactive: It can be handled using keyboard as well as mouse.
3. Process sorting: You can sort the processes based on cpu or memory utilisation.
4. Help Menu: You can take advantage of help menu within this utility for carrying out different tasks.

Htop linux installation:

Before proceeding with htop installation we need to install EPEL repository on the system. Below are the commands for the same.

For 32 Bit htop installation:

RHEL 6 & CentOS 6 

For RHEL 5 , Fedora and CentOS 5

For 64 Bit htop installation:

For RHEL 5 , Fedora and CentOS 5

RHEL 6 & CentOS 6 

RHEL 7 & CentOS 7

Sample RHEL7 installation:

Once you are done with EPEL installation go ahead with htop installation using yum:

Sample Htop Installation on RHEL7

For Debian and Ubuntu:

Process monitoring using htop linux

To monitoring process simply type htop command on the command prompt.

In the sample htop output above system display information like CPU , Memory  and Swap utilisation. And on the right side it displays Load average and uptime as well.

• Sorting Process by CPU or Memory utilisation. 

To Sort the processes by CPU or Memory simple hit F6 key and select Percent CPU or Percent Memory and hit enter to see result.

1. Press F6.
2. Now select Percent CPU or Percent Memory as per you need and hit Enter.

Now system displays Process sorted by Memory utilisation as below:

To copy the output as text , Press “Shift” button and select the windows text using mouse.

• Displaying information related specific user:

  Lets say you want to show processes related to root user only then give below command.

  [root@rhel2 ~]# htop -u root

  1	[root@rhel2 ~]# htop -u root

• To take help on various options Simply hit F1 key and system will show all the options as below:

  htop 2.0.2 - (C) 2004-2016 Hisham Muhammad Released under the GNU GPL. See 'man' page for more info. CPU usage bar: [low-priority/normal/kernel/virtualiz used%] Memory bar: [used/buffers/cache used/total] Swap bar: [used used/total] Type and layout of header meters are configurable in the setup screen. Status: R: running; S: sleeping; T: traced/stopped; Z: zombie; D: disk sleep Arrows: scroll process list Space: tag process Digits: incremental PID search c: tag process and its children F3 /: incremental name search U: untag all processes F4 \: incremental name filtering F9 k: kill process/tagged processes F5 t: tree view F7 ]: higher priority (root only) p: toggle program path F8 [: lower priority (+ nice) u: show processes of a single user a: set CPU affinity H: hide/show user process threads e: show process environment K: hide/show kernel threads i: set IO priority F: cursor follows process l: list open files with lsof F6 + -: expand/collapse tree s: trace syscalls with strace P M T: sort by CPU%, MEM% or TIME I: invert sort order F2 S: setup F6 >: select sort column F1 h: show this help screen Press any key to return. F10 q:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

  htop 2.0.2 - (C) 2004-2016 Hisham Muhammad Released under the GNU GPL. See 'man' page for more info.   CPU usage bar: [low-priority/normal/kernel/virtualiz               used%] Memory bar:    [used/buffers/cache                            used/total] Swap bar:      [used                                          used/total] Type and layout of header meters are configurable in the setup screen.   Status: R: running; S: sleeping; T: traced/stopped; Z: zombie; D: disk sleep Arrows: scroll process list              Space: tag process Digits: incremental PID search               c: tag process and its children    F3 /: incremental name search              U: untag all processes    F4 \: incremental name filtering        F9 k: kill process/tagged processes    F5 t: tree view                         F7 ]: higher priority (root only)       p: toggle program path               F8 [: lower priority (+ nice)       u: show processes of a single user      a: set CPU affinity       H: hide/show user process threads       e: show process environment       K: hide/show kernel threads             i: set IO priority       F: cursor follows process               l: list open files with lsof F6 + -: expand/collapse tree                 s: trace syscalls with strace   P M T: sort by CPU%, MEM% or TIME       I: invert sort order                 F2 S: setup    F6 >: select sort column                F1 h: show this help screen Press any key to return.                  F10 q:

Please check post about different ways of checking top CPU consuming processes.