No matter your Linux system, be it desktop or server, there will be quite a large number of processes running at any given time. Hopefully those processes are all running as expected. But if not, this article from TechRepublic Premium has some tips to get your processes running smoothly again including how to list running processes, how to kill a running process, how to “nice” a process, and more.

From the article:

There are a number of handy tools for finding out information on currently running processes. One of the most widely used tools is top. Top is a tool that displays real-time information about running processes. The top output is listed in the following columns:

• PID – The process ID of each task
• User – The username of task owner
• PR – Priority of a process (higher the number, the higher the priority)
• NI – The nice value of a task
• VIRT – Virtual memory used (in kb)
• RES – Physical memory used (in kb)
• SHR – Shared memory used (in kb)
• %CPU – Percentage of the CPU the process uses
• %MEM – Percentage of the system memory a process uses
• TIME – Total CPU time
• COMMAND – The command name for the process