On 5/11/07, Keith M Wesolowski <keith.wesolowski at sun.com> wrote: > On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 11:18:54PM +0100, Peter Tribble wrote: > > > My *very strong* preference is to supply top - I much prefer it > > (and most of my users do too). If you don't ship top, then you'll > > keep having people request it be integrated. > > > > (There's room for debate here - top 3.5.x or 3.6? I know I prefer > > the traditional 3.5.x.) > > Can you enumerate the specific differences that have led to your > preference for top, or for 3.5? That sort of feedback to the > Approachability Group would seem useful in deciding how best to make > prstat provide what you're looking for.
Why I use top: It shows the time, which means you can see at a glance how well it's updating and at what interval. It shows the last pid, which shows you whether you've got a lot of process creation going on, and the rough rate. It gives you a rough cpu summary (idle/user/kernel) It gives you a quick memory summary. You can not show idle processes, which can reduce the visual clutter. You can select a user to show without exiting and restarting. You can sort without exiting and restating. You can change the update rate without exiting and restarting. You can zap an errant process directly from top without having move to another window and type in something afresh. The TIME column is more readable. The CPU column has an extra decimal place. I prefer having LWP as a separate column - putting the process name and number of LWPs together makes it harder to read. I find top output much more readable - I'm not sure why, but prstat always seems more dense and cluttered. It may just be the order of the columns and the spaces breaks it up a bit. As for resource utilization, that's pretty mixed. I would expect top to be slightly heavier as it's displaying a wider range of information, but sometimes find top to be lighter weight. I use both extensively, but top is always my first choice for general use. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
