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RES: resident memory size in KiB* (the "physical memory" and a subset of VIRT).VIRT: virtual memory size in KiB (kibibytes)*.NI: a nicer representation of the priority.PID: the process id, a unique identifier for addressing the processes.
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The other columns provide useful information about the processes: In this example, they are bash (a command interpreter we're running top in), flask (a web micro-framework written in Python), and top itself.
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The COMMAND column on the far right reports the name of the process (the command you ran to start them). They are literally the "top" processes by resource usage. This means the items at the top of the list are using more CPU resources and causing more load on your system. By default, they are ordered by CPU usage in descending order. These are the processes that are running on the system.
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$ topĭepending on which version of top you're running, you'll get something that looks like this: top - 08:31:32 up 1 day, 4:09, 0 users, load average: 0.20, 0.12, 0.10 Running top on your *nix machine will show you a live, running view of the process running on your system. Top is an extremely useful program that acts similar to Windows Task Manager or MacOS's Activity Monitor. Trying to find out what's running on your machine-and which process is using up all your memory and making things slllooowwww-is a task served well by the utility top.
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