On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:02 PM, Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at sun.com> wrote: > Peter Tribble wrote: >> >> What customers want, need, and expect, is top. The real thing. >> >> Please scrap this idea and just ship top. Not only will it actually >> meet customers >> needs but it is substantially less effort. >> >> The only acceptable "top-like" implementation is top itself. >> > > Why? What features do customers expect from top that prstat doesn't supply?
Something that behaves like top, for a start. The arguments and there meaning are different, the output is different, the user interface is different. We don't ship emacs. Would having a command called emacs that invoked vi be acceptable to users? Some of the key differences (in the default output): - top has a useful overall summary at the the top that prstat lacks entirely - top shows the last pid (useful for estimating process churn) - top shows the time - top shows overall cpus tates and memory utrilization - top allows you to change the sort order, user selection, and refresh rate dynamically - top can kill and renice a process - top show % cpu with more precision - the TIME field in top is less cluttered - generally top output is easier on the eyes That's not to say that top is perfect. It has bugs, and it's lacking some features contained in prstat in the same way that prstat lacks many of the features found in top. But to ship something that is so blatantly not top in the name of familiarity will confuse users rather than help them. (It's not just Linux familiarity, but familiarity for generations of SunOS and Solaris users as well.) -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
