Explanation of everything you can see in htop/top on Linux

I've relatively recently migrated over to using btop[0], and it's the kind of modern interface, useful and informative, that I needed.

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

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.

Anyone else feel as if HN is healing? I hope this isn't the walking-ghost era of HN.

This is really good!

I use htop often but pretty much only use it to find pid or cpu-culprits, and never really understood the rest.

I've had this bookmarked since 2016, and have referred to it many times over the years.

s/htop/btop/

You'll be glad you did.

A bit silly that you can see a load average but not the amount of Watts used by your system.

Nowadays most of my processing happens on the GPU, so htop/top better evolve or become mostly irrelevant.