Raspberry Pi

Monitor Raspberry Pi Performance Using atop Utility

The atop is a command-line Linux utility that allows users to see the activities of the processes running on the system. It is a lightweight tool that can benefit Raspberry Pi users as it will help them check the system’s resource utilization, consumption, network activities, process activities and more.

The users should follow this guide to install this tool on the Raspberry Pi system.

Monitor Raspberry Pi Performance Using atop Utility

You can install atop on the Raspberry Pi system source repository via the following command:

$ sudo apt install atop -y

After the installation, enter the “atop” command on Raspberry Pi from the terminal to run the utility:

$ atop

The above command updates the information every 10 seconds. The same command can be used differently using flags to get different results on the terminal.

If you use the “-s” flag with atop command, it provides you with the information of active running process on the system:

$ atop -s

To retrieve memory usage information by each active process, you can use the following command:

$ atop -m

If you are interested in finding the more specific data of running processes on Raspberry Pi system, you can use the following command:

$ atop -v

To find the list of active users and the number of processes run by the users on Raspberry Pi system, you can use the following command:

$ atop -u

To see the commands related to the running process on Raspberry Pi system, you can use the following command:

$ atop -c

To learn about other commands and get detailed about the information revealed at the atop output, you can open the manual using the following command:

$ man atop

Read it out in case you need help using other commands for Raspberry Pi system monitoring.

Conclusion

The atop is a lightweight command-line utility for advanced system and process monitoring. It helps Raspberry Pi users analyze, debug, configure or kill processes that affect your system. It can easily be installed on a Raspberry Pi system from the source repository and you can use different atop commands to analyze your system performance in different ways. You can also open atop manual using the “man” command to get further guidance about different commands that can be used on the Raspberry Pi system.

About the author

Awais Khan

I'm an Engineer and an academic researcher by profession. My interest for Raspberry Pi, embedded systems and blogging has brought me here to share my knowledge with others.