[Cialug] network-manager and RAM

[Nathan Stien]

On 5/8/07, Matthew Nuzum <matthew.nuzum at canonical.com> wrote:
> I've heard that you can't trust top for accurately conveying memory
> usage. So what can I trust? Can I even trust top enough to assume that
> when it says 150M that a program is using considerably more ram than
> when top says its using 11M?

I don't know much about the unreliability of top, but I personally
really dig an enhanced version called htop [1].  You can apt-get
install it under Debian and *buntu.  It's got colors and a lot of
niceties to make it more readable and easier to use.  It supports most
top keybindings ('M' sort by mem usage, 'P' sort by processor usage,
etc.), plus some more "sensible" ones.  Really easy to "tag" multiple
processes and graphically send them signals, etc.

[1] http://htop.sourceforge.net/

It *seems* to reliably indicate memory usage, but then again, I'm not
really comparing it against much except my ancient and homely KDE
system monitor applet.  Works well enough to let me know when to
restart my bloaty, high-tab-count Firefox instance to avoid having to
swap.  I *hate* swapping.


-- 
Nathan P. Stien
Consulting Engineer / Software Developer
Embedded Systems Electronics and Software
http://linkedin.com/in/nathanstien
Mobile: 309.241.2581