this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 9 months ago (2 children)

htop because it's much more user-friendly than top, has the feature of sending all kinds of signals to processes, has mouse support and it generally looks good. Not a fan of btop at all. Idk how to use it and I don't like the UI. I personally love the idea of no bloat. It's just such a nice little philosophy. Sometimes I even want to use a CLI only computer tbh. Though htop weights only a few kilobytes and it has features top doesn't have so I don't consider it bloat. I had it on my server as well

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Yeah, I can understand RAM use in htop, but not in top

Also, the Tree View makes it easy to see which part of has become a zombie, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Uh, temperatures, that's nice.

I'd really like one of these to include GPU stats (I know, there's nvtop or whatever it's called), GUI apps can do it (Mission Center and a KDE system monitor widget), but I've not seen a CLI program include that ...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

btop has GPU stats in recent versions.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

It's no burden. Don't overthink it. Use whatever you like.

[–] DrillingStricken 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Totally, but I do want to know about other people experience tho. So if you don't mind, share with me my friend.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

btop is not only beautiful but contains more info more dense more compact.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

htop is my go-to these days. It tells me what I need to know, and it's just nice to look at.

[–] DrillingStricken 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I've given both htop and btop a spin, and I have to say that I really prefer htop. It offers a prettier interface and more features than top, while still feeling less bloated than btop to me. So yeah, it's definitely my go-to choice!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Btop is pretty. Htop tells me what I want to know. I prefer htop and it's my goto.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

btop for bling

htop for practical utility

top for minimalism, availability, reliability

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

htop on our vms and clusters, because it's in all the repos, it's fast, it's configurable by a deployable config file, it's very clearly laid out and it does everything I need. I definitely would not call it bloated in any way.

My config includes network and i/o traffic stats, and details cpu load type - this in particular makes iowait very easy to spot when finding out why something's racking up big sysloads. Plus, it looks very impressive on a machine with 80 cores...

My brain can't parse top's output very well for anything other than looking for the highest cpu process.

But - ymmv. Everyone has a preference and we have lots of choice, it doesn't make one thing better or worse than another.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

htop gives me enough info without being too busy or slow, it's also in basically every OS repo by default so no complicated install.

The other ones can look awesome, but they're often harder to get info from quickly due to being too cluttered.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I like htop because it has nice CPU graphs and a good tui for navigating. Top is a bit too obtuse for a new user, especially since CPU time is measured per core and not per the entire CPU. Plus I never figured out how turbo boost plays a roll in those percents.

I haven’t gotten around to messing with btop, but it seems like more of what I like.

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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

[–] Shareni 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

btop because pretty colors :3

i still need to learn how to use top well though, just in case that's the only option some day. if all else fails i just resort back to ps and (p)kill.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

htop because pretty colors and graphs.

Or top because it's like muscle memory now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I like htop more, but btop has better colors and graphs (imo)

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm more of a bottom, if you know what I mean.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I tend to go with htop purely out of habit. btop is better but I simply don't think to use it.

[–] DrillingStricken 4 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Why do you think that? After this post, I will try out both of them but maybe eventually I will still just use top out of, same as you bro, habit.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Htop, but only because its what I've always used and have no need to change at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Htop is completly customizable for how the sections of data are displayed. it is a bit convoluted the first time you start, but then it makes

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

btop for system resource monitoring, htop for actually finding and killing processes

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I love btop because of how fancy the graphs look and it also shows disk utilisation. I use it pretty much wherever I can. When I want something more simple I use bottom btm --basic and alias it to top

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

atop, especially because you can take snapshots over time of what the system was doing and use it to backtrack when bad things happen.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I like btop because of its ease of use and modern gui. When I open top or even htop it feels like I'm using something designed for a dumb terminal from the 70s. When opening btop it feels like something designed for how computers are used now and not 50 years ago.

Also to my knowledge It's the only full system monitor to include GPU monitoring (while other GPU monitors exist they usually only monitor the GPU and not the whole system)

[–] DrillingStricken 3 points 9 months ago

Agree with you on the beauty of btop, but sometimes less is more and that's why I think it's bloated. When working with the terminal, text-based programs work best on it so htop is much more to my liking due to its minimalist interface.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Much better to quickly determine CPU and memory load.

[–] DrillingStricken 3 points 9 months ago

top's output does appear somewhat cryptic and hard to digest quickly.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

bpytop, it's just too pretty to pass up.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I thought btop replaced it. Didn't know that was still around

Edit: looking at the github: it isn't around anymore 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Oof, I'm a dumdum. Thanks for the correction.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)
top

Because it exists in nearly every environment I might need to check usage. From my desktop, through laptops, lab machines, routers, embedded systems, IoT to cloud, I don't have to keep the muscle memory of more than one app.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Btop, it's pretty. Htop when I'm lazy or working on a system that's bare bones.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

btop, but if I cannot get it, htop.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I use btop all the time, used htop before I knew about btop, almost never use top.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

btop, since I can use vi bindings to move around in it.

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