Why do you find yourself opting for btop or htop instead of top? What advantages do these tools offer that make them superior to top in your opinion?

top has served me well, so I’m unsure why I would want to burden my system with the addition of htop or btop. With top, if you wish to terminate a process, simply press ‘k’ and send the signal; it’s that simple. If you’d like to identify the origin of a process, just include the command column.

I often find myself intrigued when encountering comments on posts expressing love for htop/btop. To me, it appears unnecessary or BLOATED!! Please do share your perspectives and help broaden my Linux knowledgebase.

  • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    Also fuck the “muh bloat” people. I have an i9 and 32 gigs of ram. I don’t care that a monitor util takes 1/10th of a second longer to launch and uses 1MB more of ram.

    Maybe you only use those tools on your desktop but on a cloud server with only 1-2GB of RAM you really don’t want your monitoring to take up some significant percentage of that. Especially when you are debugging things like OOM conditions already.

    • Shareni@programming.dev
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      8 months ago
      1. Why are you using top instead of ps if you’re worried about memory?

      2. Containerise it, and you can debug locally

      3. It’s not what the person you’re replying to is talking about. You’re using a slightly better tool for a specific job, they’re talking about people who won’t use htop/btop on their own machine because BLOAT.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If I was that memory- and cpu-constrained I would be using other tools such as memstat, iostat, and cpustat.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      you really don’t want your monitoring to take up some significant percentage of that

      except it doesn’t - both htop and btop use <30 MB

      and if 20MB makes a difference, you don’t need a different top, you need a different machine

      “bloat bad” people are just obnoxious