htop – Linux Server Process Monitor

I. What is Htop?

Htop  is an interactive, real-time process monitoring application intended for host systems such as Linux/Unix and is also a handy alternative to commands top, as a monitoring tool The default process is built-in on all Linux operating systems.

Htop  has many user-friendly features such as:

• In htop , you can scroll vertically to see the full process list and scroll horizontally to see the full command lines.
• Htop works very fast, and it doesn’t need to wait to fetch data during startup.
• In a short time you can disable multiple processes at once without inserting their PID.
• Use the “e” button to print the set of environment variables for a process.
• Use the mouse to select items in the menu list.

II. Install Htop on Linux server

To install  Htop  on  RHEL 8/7/6/5  and  CentOS 8/7/6/5 , your system must install and enable EPEL storage system  , to do that, you need to run the following commands corresponding operating system you are using, including 32bit and 64bit.

-------------- For RHEL/CentOS 7 --------------
yum install epel-release -y
Once the EPEL library   has been installed, you can use the following yum command to fetch and install the htop package .

yum install htop -y

On Fedora OS

Fedora users   can easily install htop using the  Fedora Extras repository  by typing:

yum install htop
dnf install htop [For Fedora 22+ releases]

On Debian and Ubuntu

In  Debian  and  Ubuntu  , you can install htop by typing:

apt-get install htop

III. User manual htop

To use Htop, you just need to press htop in the terminal interface.

htop

Htop mainly has three main parts as follows:

• Head: Where we can see information like CPU usage ,  RAM Memory  , Swap  and also show tasks,  Load Average  and  Server Uptime .
• Body: List of processes sorted by CPU usage  .
• Footer: Shows various options like  help ,  setup ,  kill process ,  exit,  etc.

If you want to see the tree of the list, you can click on Tree or t on the keyboard or simply press F5 .

If you want to disable a process you just need to click on the process or use the up and down arrow keys and select the Kill button or use F9 .

Shortcut keys and function keys Htop:

Some shortcuts and function keys that we use to interact with htop.

IV. Summary

Hopefully this article will help you manage your Linux server more flexibly.