Resource Monitoring

HTop - Interactive Process Monitoring

Use the htop command to start:

HTop provides a quick way to see processor, memory, and swap usage. It also allows the user to quickly see and manage running processes on the system. By default processes are sorted by CPU usage. Some quick tips:

Sort by memory usage: SHIFT+M
Sort by CPU usage: SHIFT+P
To kill a process (such as a runaway or locked process) highlight the target process and press F9

Usually the SIGTERM (15) will terminate the process. To force kill a process, use SIGKILL (9).

Disk Usage

The df command provides a quick way to monitor disk usage, here combined with the -h flag to display in a human readable format:

An explanation of the different locations specified in the Mounted on column that are of importance to users:

/tmp - used for temporary files, usually backed by memory making speeds fast, but doesn't allow for a large amount of storage
/home - where user account data is stored (documents, development code, etc)
/var/tmp (if available) - used for temporary files but larger and slower than /tmp