Terminal Tips: Monitor System Performance with Top

By C.K. Sample, III

Launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/). At the command line, type top and hit return. You will see something that looks like this:

 This screen will continue to update live, giving you the latest information on your system performance,
including how much memory you are using, how much processor is being used, and which program is eating up the most of your system resources.  If there is a real hog running on your system, all you have to do is launch another Terminal window by going to File—>New Shell and type kill followed by the PID number of the system hog and return to force the program to quit. To quit top, simply hit q or CTRL+C.

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