Linux Process Resource Monitoring: CPU, Memory, and Load Analysis

Process Resource Analysis

Understanding which processes consume the most resources is essential for capacity planning, performance optimization, and troubleshooting slow servers.

Top CPU Consumers

ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head -15
top -b -n 1 | head -20
pidstat -u 1 5

Top Memory Consumers

ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -15
ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%mem,%cpu --sort=-%mem | head -15
smem -tk | tail -10

Process State Analysis

ps aux | awk "{print \$8}" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
# R=Running, S=Sleeping, D=Disk wait, Z=Zombie, T=Stopped

System Load Understanding

uptime
cat /proc/loadavg
# Load average vs CPU cores determines overload
nproc  # number of CPU cores

Automated Monitoring with dargslan-proc-monitor

pip install dargslan-proc-monitor
dargslan-proc-monitor
dargslan-proc-monitor --cpu
dargslan-proc-monitor --memory
dargslan-proc-monitor --load