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I would like to monitor one process's memory / cpu usage in real time. Similar to top but targeted at only one process, preferably with a history graph of some sort.

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What memory statistics do you want? There are lots of them. – vwduder Jan 13 '11 at 11:33
Memory usage over a given time frame, current usage, maximum usage, average. – Josh K Jan 13 '11 at 11:33

3 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

top actually supports focusing on a single process, although it naturally doesn't have a history graph:

top -p PID
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And since you may not want to look up the PID every time, try something like top -p `pgrep -f /usr/bin/kvm`. – Stefan Lasiewski Aug 17 '10 at 3:33
I use Cacti to monitor some individual processes, but installing a full blown Cacti installation sounds too complex for the simple situation asked here. – Stefan Lasiewski Aug 17 '10 at 3:34
@Stefan: I'm assuming I would have to run that remotely? – Josh K Aug 17 '10 at 4:00
@Josh : Yes you would need to run Cacti (Which requires MySQL, Apache and few other packages) on another server. On most distros, it's pretty simple to install using Yum or apt-get. – Stefan Lasiewski Aug 17 '10 at 20:48
up vote 5 down vote

htop is a great replacement to top. It has... Colors! Simple keyboard shortcuts! Scroll the list using the arrow keys! Kill a process without leaving and without taking note of the PID! Mark multiple processes and kill them all!

Among all of the features, the manpage says you can press F to follow a process.

Really, you should try htop. I never started top again, after the first time I used htop.

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+1 for htop. This is one of the first program I install on a new system. It makes my life much easier. The tree view is also very handy. – Barthelemy Nov 24 '10 at 12:22
top also has colors. Press z. – Tshepang Jan 12 '11 at 1:41
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You're right! top has colors! Too bad its colors are quite useless, specially when compared to htop (which fades other users processes and highlights the program basename). – Denilson Sá Jan 12 '11 at 18:17
top can also kill processes without leaving. Just hit k. – AvatarOfChronos Jul 19 '12 at 13:57
up vote 4 down vote

I normally use following two :

  1. HP caliper : its very good tool for monitoring processes it you can check call graph and other low level information also. But please note its free only for personal use.

  2. daemontools : a collection of tools for managing UNIX services

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I used daemontools for years. It's great as a supervisor/watchdog for other processes. How does it help you monitor CPU/memory usage for one process? – Stefan Lasiewski Aug 19 '10 at 4:05

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