LWN: Comments on "One-stop performance analysis using atop"

One-stop performance analysis using atop

liljencrantz — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:07:51 +0000

Great idea for an article.

I read about atop years ago, and it sounded very useful, but I never got round to ditching good old top - familiarity is sometimes powerful. This article provided me a little kick, and i just apt-get:ed atop. Hopefully I'll stick with it.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

Tobu — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:47:23 +0000

The problem with these fancier top programs (e.g. compared to simple Busybox top) is that they take more CPU and are slower to start. If your system is sometimes _really_ slow, but only temporarily, it matters a lot how fast "top" starts and can update its screen.

The nice thing with atop is that it has per-process, historical info. Assuming you use the debian package which sets up cronjobs and logrotate, you can run sudo atop -r, use t and T to navigate the day in 10s slices, find the time the system slowed down, and pinpoint the problem process and the scarce resource. Thanks to process accounting, data is logged reliably under load.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

jcvw — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:31:05 +0000

This problem has been solved as of version 1.25.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

sfink — Sun, 30 May 2010 22:34:34 +0000

I love atop and have been using it quite a bit over the last year. One warning, though -- the binary format changes rather frequently, and newer versions of the program are generally not backward-compatible with older formats. This can be a big problem if you are using it to capture performance regression data for test runs. The newer versions often add enough juicy features to make the upgrade worthwhile, but then you can no longer write a single tool that will allow comparing results with your older runs.

For a while, I dealt with it by writing a wrapper script that autodetected the appropriate version and used the text dump command-line options, but eventually it was enough of a nuisance that I patched in backwards compatibility. The patch wasn't accepted, I forget why. (I think the reason was reasonable, though.)

One-stop performance analysis using atop

oak — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:52:46 +0000

htop is also pretty nice, easily configurable and although ncurses based, supports mouse & colors. It shows only the current state, not history (and no disk or network usage), but from TIME+ column one can check whether process CPU ticks value increase.

Latest version allows stracing selected process (it should use "-f" arg for strace though, so that all threads are tracked) or using lsof.

The problem with these fancier top programs (e.g. compared to simple Busybox top) is that they take more CPU and are slower to start. If your system is sometimes _really_ slow, but only temporarily, it matters a lot how fast "top" starts and can update its screen.

System Activity in KDE

johnflux — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:45:09 +0000

Hi all,

I'm the author of System Activity in KDE. It pops up if you press ctrl+esc in KDE.

It has some of the features of atop. For example, it shows the disk IO usage, lets you see and set the CPU scheduler and I/O scheduler, etc.

It also has javascript scripting support which is used, for example, to show detailed memory information for a process etc. And shows the window title for each process - very useful if you have multiple firefox programs running etc.

Anyway, check it out. My aim has to been to make it as simple to use as possible.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

fjalvingh — Sun, 16 May 2010 10:18:45 +0000

A very useful addition to the *top commands! Thanks for the article!

One-stop performance analysis using atop

jcgl — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:42:27 +0000

The authors' email address is listed in the atop man page.
( http://atoptool.nl/download/man_atop.pdf )

One-stop performance analysis using atop

roryi — Fri, 14 May 2010 09:34:53 +0000

Let me add another note of thanks for this article.

I've long used a mix of sar, dstat, and iotop - atop looks like a great replacement for all three.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

HappyCamp — Thu, 13 May 2010 21:26:59 +0000

Thanks!

Fedora 12 has 1.23. And looking at the changelog it appears that 1.24 added better ability to size the atop program based on the display.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

hazmat — Thu, 13 May 2010 18:53:48 +0000

latest release (1.2.5) seems to work fine with scaling to larger terminal windows.

One-stop performance analysis using atop

HappyCamp — Thu, 13 May 2010 14:49:30 +0000

Thanks a lot for the article. I am going to try this tool out.

The project's website is somewhat disappointing. I could not find any information on a mailing list, IRC channel, source code repository, who the author is, etc...

The only contact method was a web form :(

Main reason I was looking for this info was I was trying to see if it was possible to make the display fill the whole screen, since it chops off the command line arguments on my display, even though it could go much wider.