The KTop Handbook: Using the KDE Task Manager
Description: ktop
Keywords: process monitor, top, ps

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### 3. Using the KDE Task Manager

After you have started the Task Manager you will see a dialog box with two pages. You can change to other pages by clicking on the handle of the pages.

### 3.1 The Main Menu

#### The File Menu

This menu just contains on item. If you select it KTop will terminate. On termination all settings are save automatically and restored the next time KTop is invoked.

#### The Refresh Rate Menu

The refresh rate determines how often the process list will be updated. This is particularly important for the calculation of the processor load of each process. The load is averaged over the whole time between updates. A slow, a medium and a fast update rate is available. For most purposes the medium rate is a good compromise. This menu is only available when the Process List page is visible.

#### The Process Menu

This menu allows you to send certain signals to this process or change it's scheduling priority. The latter is not available on all operating systems. Changing the priority will affect the amount of CPU time the process will receive to do it's job. As a normal user you can usually only increase the value which will decrease the priority. The higher the value the less likely the process will get CPU time. This can be used on systems that are shared by many people. Longer running jobs (batch jobs) should be "reniced" to preserve a short response time for interactive processes.

This menu is only enabled when a process has been selected. It's also available as Right-Mouse-Button-Pop-up menu when clicking on a process.

### 3.2 The Process List Page

The Process List Page gives you a list of processes on your system. The list can be sorted by each column. Just press the left mouse button over the head of the column. Another mouse click on the same column will revert the sorting direction.

Due to a bug in the underlying Qt widget the columns only expand automatically, but do not shrink. This will hopefully be fixed in the next release.

The list shows the following information about each process. Please note that not all properties are available on every operating system.

- Name The name of the executable that started the process.
- PID The process ID. A unique number for each process.
- User ID The login name of the user that started the process.
- CPU The processor load of the process in percent.
- Time The total computation time of the process so far.
- Nice The scheduling priority.
- Status The process status.
- Memory The total amount of memory (in kBytes) the process uses. This includes shared memory.
- Resident The amount of physical memory (in kBytes) the process uses.
- Shared The amount of memory (in kBytes) the process shares with other processes.
- Commandline The command that was used to invoke this process.

Underneath the table you find four buttons which will be described now from left to right.

#### The Show Tree Button

This button is used to toggle between list and tree mode. In tree mode the processes are displayed in a tree form to show their caller/callee relationship. A tree is an elegant way to show this parent-child relationship. The init process is the ancester of all processes.

#### The Process Filter

The Process Filter can be used to reduce the number of processes displayed in the table. You can filter out processes you are not interested in. Currently you can display all processes, system processes only, user processes only or your processes only.

#### The Refresh Button

This button can be used to force an immediate update of the process list.

#### The Kill Button

If you want to terminate a process you can send a kill signal to the selected process by pressing this button.

### 3.3 The Performance Meter Page

The Performance Meter Page provides two meters that show the overall processor load and the total memory used by the system. Most Unixes try to minimize the accesses to the hard disk by caching files in memory. Therefore it is normal to always have almost the whole physical memory in use. This is not necessarily a sign of excessive memory use by certain programs but a sign of good caching strategies.

Physical memory that is used for buffers or data caching is displayed in green and yellow. The red part is swapped-out memory. That is data from your main memory that was temporarily swapped to the hard disk to make room for more important data in memory.

On Linux 2.2 SMP systems you will get additional meters for each processor.

If the KTop window is large enough not only the load/memory history is shown but also digital meters for each value. If you don't see them just increase the size of the KTop window.

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