2005/07/09 atop performance monitor

"atop" is similar in concept to top, but it uses process accounting (see "man accton") to pick up extra information about processes. As process accounting can suck down significant disk space, atop turns it on and off with each usage. That does mean that if atop is killed while running you may be stuck with process accounting stuck on; if that should happen, a simnple "accton" (no arguments) will turn it off.

Because process accounting is used, atop can include information about processes that disappeared during its sampling period. It also keeps track of memory usage and will show you if a process is leaking memory or just continually using more and more - that's sometimes harder to spot with other tools.

With a kernel patch, atop can show which processes are responsible for disk or network loads. That's often extremely difficult to track down otherwise; you know from iostat or sar that something is hammering at the disk, but you don't know what; atop can tell you.

Without atop or accton, you can do quite a bit by capturing lsof output and comparing it over a short period of time. That's hardly as convenient or as informative as atop, though.

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