Viewing resource usage with htop

When wanting to view the overall performance of your server, nothing beats htop. Although not typically installed by default, htop is one of those utilities that I recommend everyone installs as soon as possible, since it’s indispensable when wanting to check on the resource utilization of your server. It’s so useful in fact that I’ve mentioned it several times earlier in this chapter, even before we started an actual discussion about it in this section. It’s a great utility.

If you don’t already have htop installed, all you need to do is install it with apt:

sudo apt install htop 

When you run htop at your shell prompt, you will see the htop application in all its glory. In some cases, it may be beneficial to run htop as root, since doing so does give you additional options such as being able to kill processes, though this is not required:

Figure 8.7: Running htop

At the top of the htop...