Friday June 15, 2007 (08:01 AM GMT)
By: Gary Sims
All modern operating systems are able to run many programs at the same time. For example, a typical Linux server might include a Web server, an email server, and probably a database service. Each of these programs runs as a separate process. What do you do if one of your services stops working? Here are some handy command-line tools for managing processes.
Each process uses time on a system’s CPU, as well as other system resources such as memory and disk space. If a program goes wrong, it can start to use too much CPU time or memory and so deny other programs the resources they need to run.
Knowing how to manage rogue processes is an essential part of Linux system management. To help, turn to command-line tools such as ps, top, service, kill, and killall.
