How to install htop Monitoring utility on Linux Mint 18.3
To install htop Monitoring Utility on Linux Mint 18.3
htop is a system monitoring utility that runs on the terminal. It is similar to another commonly used utility called top. But htop is much easier to use. You can also filter, manage and do other cool stuff on the running processes with htop utility. It is a great tool for Linux system administrators. It is so simple to install htop Monitoring Utility on Linux Mint 18.3, and this tutorial covers the ground on the same process.
Installing htop
First, make sure you update the package repository by making use of the following command.
linuxhelp ~ # apt-get update
Hit:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease
Hit:3 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease
Ign:4 http://packages.linuxmint.com sylvia InRelease
Hit:5 http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease
Hit:6 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports InRelease
Hit:7 http://packages.linuxmint.com sylvia Release
Reading package lists... Done
The package repository cache should be updated.
Since htop is available in the official package repository you can straightaway proceed to install it using the following command.
linuxhelp ~ # apt-get install htop
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
htop
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 261 not upgraded.
Need to get 76.4 kB of archives.
After this operation, 215 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe amd64 htop amd64 2.0.1-1ubuntu1 [76.4 kB]
Fetched 76.4 kB in 0s (83.4 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package htop.
(Reading database ... 223888 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../htop_2.0.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking htop (2.0.1-1ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22+linuxmint1) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
Setting up htop (2.0.1-1ubuntu1) ...
Once you are through with the installation, you shall open the application by making use of the following command.
linuxhelp ~ # htop
Now that htop has been installed, we shall see some of the options available on it. You can see the uptime of your computer and also find CPU usage. Also, find how much main memory or RAM is available and how much is used
You can search for a specific process with htop. For example, let’ s say you want to search for the process ‘ firefox’ . First start htop and press ' F3' from the keyboard, a search box should appear.
In that search box, type ‘ firefox’ , and you should see firefox process selected.
You can see that the process id (PID) is 31321 and the process is owned by USER user. If you want to go to the next firefox process or search result, press F3 key again. Once you find the process you’ re looking for, press Enter key to select it. You can also kill a process with htop utility. You need to select the process which you want to kill and press F9 key.
You should see the following window as shown in the screenshot below. In the marked section, there are different Linux signals listed. These signals are used to manage Linux processes. To kill a process, the default signal for htop is SIGTERM
Once you select the signal you want to send to the process, press Enter key. The process should be killed.
You can switch to a tree view instead of the default view mode of htop by simply pressing on the You can switch to Tree view if you want by pressing F5 key.
You can go back to Sorted view again by pressing F5 key. For customizing htop Window, you can simply press F2 button to go to htop configuration window.
Once you’ re done, you can exit out of htop window using the ‘ q’ key. That’ s how you install and use htop on Linux Mint 18.3
Below the cpu progress bars you will see the memory and swap progress bars. Like the cpu progress bars the memory and swap progress bars can be comprised of different colors. Here is a list of what the colors means within relation to the memory and swap progress bars.
Green: Used memory pages
Blue: Buffer pages
Yellow: Cache pages
The numbers on the top left from 1 to 8 represents the number of cpu's/cores in my system with the progress bar next to them representing the load of cpu/core. As you would have noticed the progress bars can be comprised of different colors. The following list will explain what each color means.
Blue: low priority processes (nice > 0)
Green: normal (user) processes
Red: kernel processes
Yellow: IRQ time
Magenta: Soft IRQ time
Grey: IO Wait time
The system load is a measure of the amount of computational work that a computer system performs. The load average represents the average system load over a period of time. 1.0 on a single core cpu represents 100% utilization. Note that loads can exceed 1.0 this just means that processes have to wait longer for the cpu. 4.0 on a quad core represents 100% utilization. Anything under a 4.0 load average for a quad-core is ok as the load is distributed over the 4 cores.