top and htop

top, and Why You Want htop Instead

top ships everywhere and redraws a sorted process table every three seconds (Finding Resource Hogs reads its header); P, M and T sort, k kills, q quits. htop 386,022 (github.com/htop-dev/htop (https://github.com/htop-dev/htop 8,352 ), GPL-2.0) adds meter bars, scrolling, the mouse, full command lines, a tree and an action per function key. Ubuntu 26.04 225 ships 3.4.1; upstream released 3.5.3 on 16 August 2026. This frame, captured with tmux 49,533 capture-pane, shows two throwaway scripts: burn.php, an endless loop, and hog.php, holding 300 MB. On this 36-thread machine, F2 Setup swapped the per-core bars for an average meter.

Output of 55
  Avg[|||                                 2.8%] Tasks: 66, 81 thr, 0 kthr; 2 running
  Mem[||||                         1.55G/62.6G] Load average: 0.42 0.40 0.32
  Swp[                                0K/16.0G] Uptime: 00:54:56
  [Main] [I/O]
    PID USER       PRI  NI  VIRT   RES   SHR S  CPU%▽MEM%   TIME+  Command
   9390 dev         20   0  112M 37172 28792 R 100.5  0.1  0:08.69 php /tmp/ch01-08/burn.php
    377 mysql       20   0 2478M  471M 45688 S   0.7  0.7  0:06.89 /usr/sbin/mysqld
...
F1Help  F2Setup F3SearchF4FilterF5Tree  F6SortByF7Nice -F8Nice +F9Kill  F10Quit

CPU% is per core: 100.5 is one core pegged while the 36-core average reads 2.8%, so a runaway worker hides in the average.