10.5 Managing Processes

Clicking the View Process Information link in the navigation frame displays the Process Information page. On this page, you can view a list of all the processes as well as their state in the host and perform the actions listed in the following table.

Table 10-5 Process Information Page Tasks and Procedures

Tasks

Procedures

Sort the process by name (in alphabetical order by default), by process ID, by CPU Usage, or by Memory Usage

Click the Sort icon at the top of the applicable column.

View more specific information about a listed process

Click the link for the applicable process under the Name column.

Kill a process

  1. Click the link for the applicable process under the Name column.

  2. Click Kill.

The process information is obtained from the stat file that is available for each process ID in the /proc directory. Process information can also be retrieved at the command line by using the Linux top command.

Table 10-6 describes the parameters reported for each process.

Table 10-6 Process Information

Parameter

Description

Name

The process name.

Owner

The process owner; the user who started the process.

ID (Status)

The process ID of the task, and the current state of the task. The states are Sleep (S), Running (R), Traced (T), or Zombied (Z). These states are modified by a trailing < for a process with a negative nice value, N for a process with positive nice value, and W for a swapped-out process (this does not work correctly for kernel processes).

CPU Usage %

The task's share of the CPU time since the last screen update, expressed as a percentage of total CPU time per processor.

Priority

The priority of the task.

Run Time

The total CPU time the task has used since it started.

Physical Memory

The physical memory value is the amount of physical memory in bytes that the task is using. The value in parentheses (%) is the percentage of RAM memory that this represents. The Linux top command reports this information in kilobytes.

Virtual Memory

The virtual memory is the amount of memory in bytes that the task is using to hold the code, data, and stack space memory. The Linux top command reports this information in kilobytes. Virtual Memory is the value reported by the RSS switch for the top command.

Figure 10-5 Example Process Information Page