When I read stuff like this, I come to the realization that even after daily driving Linux for 20+ years I still barely utilize its full potential. Great article.
2 Settings I change on every htop which makes a HUGE difference.
1. I disable user threads. Those mostly just clutter up the htop view while providing no useful information.
2. I enable the process tree view. Very frequently, where a process comes from is much more important than other information. It also lets you see and track things like a compiler process which is eating through a bunch of files.
IMO, both these things should be the default behavior of htop.
For top if you use the > character it will sort by memory usage. I use that sometimes to figure out why my host is becoming laggy. Also you'll see swapd is taking up CPU.
Nowadays most of my processing happens on the GPU, so htop/top better evolve or become mostly irrelevant because a tool that will support both CPU __and__ GPU will replace it.
> Nowadays most of my processing happens on the GPU, so htop/top better evolve or become mostly irrelevant
If you’re a 3D rendering designer, an ML engineer or a crypto bro, then sure.
Here are the common workloads (for the average SWE on HN) that use CPU/RAM:
- compilation/builds
- language servers and IDEs
- test suites
- local containers
- local databases
- node tooling
- browsers
- data processing
- compression and encryption
- searching/indexing
As others mention it - it seems to shows the Watts used as well :) (and network, and GPU, and disks,....)
[0]: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop
1. I disable user threads. Those mostly just clutter up the htop view while providing no useful information.
2. I enable the process tree view. Very frequently, where a process comes from is much more important than other information. It also lets you see and track things like a compiler process which is eating through a bunch of files.
IMO, both these things should be the default behavior of htop.
I use htop often but pretty much only use it to find pid or cpu-culprits, and never really understood the rest.
You'll be glad you did.
What good does it do to stick your head in the sand?
CPUs are great for orchestrating work, GPUs are great for actually doing the work.
Right, and wouldn't it be really nice if we could check on our orchestrators to make sure their not bottlenecking ops?
"How come we can fully load the GPUs?" "Idk boss, amelius said htop et al were irrelevant so we can't really investigate"
Get the fuck out. I do write for GPU as well. One does not replace the other.
If you’re a 3D rendering designer, an ML engineer or a crypto bro, then sure.
Here are the common workloads (for the average SWE on HN) that use CPU/RAM:
Ok sure, top/htop is totally irrelevant now /s