Manpages

NAME

pcp-atop - Advanced System and Process Monitor

SYNOPSIS

Interactive Usage:

pcp [pcp options] atop [-aABcCdDfFgGHmMnNopRsuvxyY1] [-L linelen] [-Plabel[,label]... [-Z]] [interval [samples]]

Writing and reading PCP archive folios:

pcp atop -w folio [-a] [-S] [interval [samples]]
pcp atop -r folio [-AcCdDfFgGmMnNopRsuvxy1] [-b [yy-mm-dd] hh:mm] [-e yy-mm-dd] hh:mm] [-L linelen] [-Plabel[,label]... [-Z]] [interval [samples]]

DESCRIPTION

The program pcp-atop is an interactive monitor to view various aspects of load on a system. Every interval seconds (default: 10 seconds) information is gathered about the resource occupation on system level of the most critical hardware resources (from a performance point of view), i.e. CPUs, memory, disks and network interfaces. Besides, information is gathered about the processes (or threads) that are responsible for the utilization of the CPUs, memory and disks. Network load per process is shown only when the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) metrics have been installed and configured.

BAR GRAPH MODE

When running pcp-atop you can choose to view the system load in bar graph mode or in text mode. In bar graph mode the resource utilization of CPUs, memory, disks and network interfaces is shown via (character-based) bar graphs, but only on system level. When you want to view more detailed information on system level or when you want to view the resource consumption on process or thread level, you can switch to text mode by pressing the ’B’ key. Alternatively, you can use the ’B’ key (again) to switch from text mode to bar graph mode.
By default, pcp-atop starts in text mode unless the -B flag is used or unless ’B’ has been configured as a default flag in the .atoprc file (for further information about default flags, refer to the pcp-atoprc(5) man page).

In bar graph mode the terminal will be subdivided into four character-based windows, i.e. one window for each hardware resource:
Processors

The first bar shows the average busy percentage of all CPUs with the bar label ’Avg’ (might be abbreviated to ’Av’ or even just ’A’). The subsequent bars show the busy percentages of single CPUs.
When there is not enough horizontal space to show all CPUs, only the most busy CPUs per sample will be shown after the width of each bar has been reduced to a minimum.

By default, the categories of CPU consumption are shown by different colors in the bars, marked with a character ’S’ (system mode), ’U’ (user mode), ’I’ (interrupt handling), ’s’ (steal) and ’G’ (guest, i.e. consumed by virtual machines).
The top of the bar might consist of an unmarked color representing a ’neutral’ category. Suppose that the scale unit is 5% per line and the total busy percentage is 54% consisting of two categories of 27%. The two categories will be rounded to 25% (5 lines of 5% each) but the total busy percentage will be rounded to 55% (11 lines of 5%). Then the top line will represent a ’neutral’ category.
By pressing the ’H’ key or by starting pcp-atop with the -H flag, no categories are shown.

A red line is drawn in the bar graph as critical threshold. By default this value is 90% and can be modified by the ’cpucritperc’ option in the configuration file (see separate pcp-atoprc(5) man page). When this value is set to zero, no threshold line will be drawn.

Memory and swap space

Memory is presented as a column in which the specific categories of memory consumption are shown. These categories are (code, data and stack of) processes/kernel, slab caches (i.e. dynamically allocated kernel memory), shared memory, tmpfs, static huge pages, page cache and free memory.
Swap space (if present) is also presented as a column in which the categories processes/tmpfs, shared memory and free space are shown.

At the right side memory-related event counters are shown.
The bottom three counters are colored green when there is no memory pressure. When considerable activity is noticed such counter might be colored orange and with high activity red.
When memory pressure starts, usually memory page scanning will be activated first. When pressure increases, memory pages of processes might be swapped out to swap space (if present).
The ’oomkills’ counter (Out Of Memory killing) is most serious: it reflects the number of processes that are killed due to lack of memory (and swap). Therefore this counter shows the absolute number (not per second) of processes being killed during the last interval and will immediately be colored red when it is 1 or more. Besides, after pcp-atop has noticed OOM killing the ’oomkills’ counter remains orange for the next 15 minutes, just in case that you have missed the OOM killing event itself.
When there is enough vertical space in the memory window, event counters are shown about the number of memory pages being swapped in, the number of memory pages paged out to block devices and the number of memory pages paged in from block devices.

Memory and swap space consumption will preferably be shown in a character-based window that vertically uses the entire screen for optimal granularity. However, when there are a lot of disks and/or network interfaces the memory and swap space consumption will be shown in a character-based window that only uses the upper half of the screen.

Disks

For each disk the busy percentage is shown as a bar.
When there is not enough horizontal space to show all disks, only the most busy disks per sample will be shown.

By default, categories of disk consumption are shown by different colors in the bars, marked with a character ’R’ (read) and ’W’ (write).
The top of the bar might consist of an unmarked color representing a ’neutral’ category. Suppose that the scale unit is 5% per line and the total busy percentage is 54% consisting of two categories of 27%. The two categories will be rounded to 25% (5 lines of 5% each) but the total busy percentage will be rounded to 55% (11 lines of 5%). Then the top line will represent a ’neutral’ category.
By pressing the ’H’ key or by starting pcp-atop with the -H flag, no categories are shown.

A red line is drawn in the bar graph as critical threshold. By default this value is 90% and can be modified by the ’dskcritperc’ option in the configuration file (see separate atoprc man page). When this value is set to zero, no threshold line will be drawn.

Interfaces

For each non-virtual network interface a double bar graph is shown with a dedicated scale that reflects the traffic rate. One of the bars shows the transmit rate (’TX’) and the other bar the receive rate (’RX’). The traffic scale of each network interface remains at its highest level. All interface scales can be reset during the measurement by pressing the ’L’ key.

Most often the real speed (maximum bandwidth) of network interfaces is not known, e.g. in case of the network interfaces of virtual machines. Therefore it is not possible to show the interface utilization as a percentage. However, when the real speed of an interface is known it will be shown underneath the concerning bar graph.

When there is not enough horizontal space to show all network interfaces, only the most busy interfaces per sample will be shown.

Usually the bar graphs will not be sorted on busy percentage when there is enough horizontal space. However, after switching from text mode to bar graph mode the bar graphs might have been sorted because this was needed for the presentation in text mode. The next interval in bar graph mode shows the bars unsorted again unless the window width is unsufficient for all bars.

The remaining part of this manual page mainly describes the information shown in text mode. When certain descriptions also apply to bar graph mode it will be mentioned explicitly.

TEXT MODE IN GENERAL

The initial screen in text mode shows if pcp-atop runs with restricted view (unprivileged user) or unrestricted view (privileged user). In case of restricted view pcp-atop does not have the privileges (root identity or necessary capabilities) to retrieve all counter values on system level and on process level. does not have the privileges (no root identity nor the necessary capabilities) to retrieve all counter values on system level and on process level.

With every interval information is shown about the resource occupation on system level (CPU, memory, disks and network layers), followed by a list of processes which have been active during the last interval. Notice that all processes that were unchanged during the last interval re not shown, unless the key ’a’ has been pressed or unless sorting on memory occupation is done (then inactive processes are relevant as well). If the list of active processes does not entirely fit on the screen, only the top of the list is shown (sorted in order of activity).
The intervals are repeated till the number of samples (specified as command argument) is reached, or till the key ’q’ is pressed in interactive mode.

When invoked via the pcp(1) command, the PCPIntro(1) options -A/--align, -a/--archive, -h/--host, -O/--origin, -S/--start, -s/--samples, -T/--finish, -t/--interval, -v/--version, -z/--hostzone and -z/--timezone become indirectly available. Additionally, the --hotproc option can be used to request the per-process PCP metrics be used instead of the default proc metrics from pmdaproc(1).

When pcp-atop is started, it checks whether the standard output channel is connected to a screen, or to a file/pipe. In the first case it produces screen control codes (via the ncurses library) and behaves interactively; in the second case it produces flat text output.

In interactive mode, the output of pcp-atop scales dynamically to the current dimensions of the screen/window.
If the window is resized horizontally, columns will be added or removed automatically. For this purpose, every column has a particular weight. The columns with the highest weights that fit within the current width will be shown.
If the window is resized vertically, lines of the process/thread list will be added or removed automatically.

In interactive mode the output of pcp-atop can be controlled by pressing particular keys. However it is also possible to specify such key as flag on the command line. In that case pcp-atop switches to the indicated mode on beforehand. This mode can be modified again interactively. Specifying such key as flag is especially useful when running pcp-atop with output to a pipe or file (non-interactively). These flags are the same as the keys that can be pressed in interactive mode (see section INTERACTIVE COMMANDS).
Additional flags are available to support storage of pcp-atop data in PCP archive format (see section PCP DATA STORAGE).

COLORS

For the resource consumption on system level, pcp-atop uses colors in text mode to indicate that a critical occupation percentage has been (almost) reached. A critical occupation percentage means that is likely that this load causes a noticeable negative performance influence for applications using this resource. The critical percentage depends on the type of resource: e.g. the performance influence of a disk with a busy percentage of 80% might be more noticeable for applications/users than a CPU with a busy percentage of 90%.
Currently pcp-atop uses the following default values to calculate a weighted percentage per resource:  
Processor

A busy percentage of 90% or higher is considered ’critical’ (also in bar graph mode).  

Disk

A busy percentage of 90% or higher is considered ’critical’.  

Network

A busy percentage of 90% or higher for the load of an interface is considered ’critical’.  

Memory

An occupation percentage of 90% is considered ’critical’. Notice that this occupation percentage is the accumulated memory consumption of the kernel (including slab) and all processes. The memory for the page cache (’cache’ and ’buff’ in the MEM-line) and the reclaimable part of the slab (’slrec’) is not implied!
If the number of pages swapped out (’swout’ in the PAG-line) is larger than 10 per second, the memory resource is considered ’critical’. A value of at least 1 per second is considered ’almost critical’.
If the committed virtual memory exceeds the limit (’vmcom’ and ’vmlim’ in the SWP-line), the SWP-line is colored due to overcommitting the system.  

Swap

An occupation percentage of 80% is considered ’critical’ because swap space might be completely exhausted in the near future. It is not critical from a performance point-of-view.

These default values can be modified in the configuration file (see separate pcp-atoprc(5) man page).

When a resource exceeds its critical occupation percentage, the concerning values in the screen line are colored red by default.
When a resource exceeds (by default) 80% of its critical percentage (so it is almost critical), the concerning values in the screen line are colored cyan by default. This ’almost critical percentage’ (one value for all resources) can be modified in the configuration file (see separate pcp-atoprc(5) man page).
The default colors red and cyan can be modified in the configuration file as well (see separate man-page of pcp-atoprc(5)).

With the key ’x’ (or flag -x), the use of colors can be suppressed in text mode. The use of colors is however mandatory in case of bar graph mode.

NETATOP BPF MODULE

Per-process and per-thread network activity can be measured by the netatop BPF module that can be separately installed with pmdabpf(1). or pmdabcc(1).
When pcp-atop gathers counters for a new interval, it verifies if the eBPF module is currently active. If so, pcp-atop obtains the relevant network counters from this module and shows the number of sent and received packets per process/thread in the generic screen. Besides, detailed counters can be requested by pressing the ’n’ key.

GPU STATISTICS GATHERING

GPU statistics can be gathered by pmdanvidia(1) which is a separate data collection daemon process. It gathers cumulative utilization counters of every Nvidia GPU in the system, as well as utilization counters of every process that uses a GPU. When pcp-atop notices that the daemon is active, it reads these GPU utilization counters with every interval.

Find a description about the utilization counters in the section OUTPUT DESCRIPTION.

INTERACTIVE COMMANDS

When running pcp-atop interactively (no output redirection), keys can be pressed to control the output. In general, lower case keys can be used to show other information for the active processes while certain upper case keys can be used to influence the sort order of the active process/thread list. Some of these keys can also be used to switch from bar graph mode to particular detailed process information in text mode.

Per process the following fields are shown in case of a window-width of 80 positions: process-id, CPU consumption during the last interval in system and user mode, the virtual and resident memory growth of the process.
The data transfer per process for read/write on disk can only be shown when pcp-atop accesses metrics with root privileges.
When the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module netatop is loaded, the data transfer for send/receive of network packets is shown for each process.
The last columns contain the state, the occupation percentage for the chosen resource (default: CPU) and the process name.

When more than 80 positions are available, other information is added.

Per process the following fields are shown in case of a window width of 80 positions: process-id, minor and major memory faults, size of virtual shared text, total virtual process size, total resident process size, virtual and resident growth during last interval, memory occupation percentage and process name.

When more than 80 positions are available, other information is added.

For memory consumption, always all processes are shown (also the processes that were not active during the interval).

When pcp-atop runs with root privileges, the following fields are shown: process-id, amount of data read from disk, amount of data written to disk, amount of data that was written but has been withdrawn again (WCANCL), disk occupation percentage and process name.

Per process the following fields are shown in case of a window width of 80 positions: process-id, thread-id, total bandwidth for received packets, total bandwidth for sent packets, number of received TCP packets with the average size per packet (in bytes), number of sent TCP packets with the average size per packet (in bytes), number of received UDP packets with the average size per packet (in bytes), number of sent UDP packets with the average size per packet (in bytes), the network occupation percentage and process name.
This information can only be shown when the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module netatop is installed.

When more than 80 positions are available, other information is added.

Per process the following fields are shown in case of a window width of 80 positions: process-id, number of threads in state ’running’ (R), number of threads in state ’interruptible sleeping’ (S), number of threads in state ’uninterruptible sleeping’ (D), number of threads in state ’idle’ (I), scheduling policy (normal timesharing, realtime round-robin, realtime fifo), nice value, priority, realtime priority, current processor, status, exit code, state, the occupation percentage for the chosen resource and the process name.

When more than 80 positions are available, other information is added.

Per process the following fields are shown in case of a window width of 80 positions: process-id, user name and group, start date and time, status (e.g. exit code if the process has finished), state, the occupation percentage for the chosen resource and the process name.

When more than 80 positions are available, other information is added.

Per process the following fields are shown: process-id, the occupation percentage for the chosen resource and the command line including arguments.

Per process the following fields are shown: process-id, the command name, and the cgroup path name (horizontally scrollable).

Per process at least the following fields are shown: process-id, range of GPU numbers on which the process currently runs, GPU busy percentage on all GPUs, memory busy percentage (i.e. read and write accesses on memory) on all GPUs, memory occupation at the moment of the sample, average memory occupation during the sample, and GPU percentage.

When the pmdanvidia daemon does not run with root privileges, the GPU busy percentage and the memory busy percentage are not available on process level. In that case, the GPU percentage on process level reflects the GPU memory occupation instead of the GPU busy percentage (which is preferred).

In the configuration file the keyword ownprocline can be specified with the description of a user-defined output-line.
Refer to the man-page of pcp-atoprc(5) for a detailed description.

Single-threaded processes are still shown as one line.
For multi-threaded processes, one line represents the process while additional lines show the activity per individual thread (in a different color). Depending on the option ’a’ (all or active toggle), all threads are shown or only the threads that were active during the last interval. Depending on the option ’Y’ (sort threads), the threads per process will be sorted on the chosen sort criterium or not.
Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Per user the following fields are shown: number of processes active or terminated during last interval (or in total if combined with command ’a’), accumulated CPU consumption during last interval in system and user mode, the current virtual and resident memory space consumed by active processes (or all processes of the user if combined with command ’a’).
When pcp-atop access metrics with root privileges, the accumulated read and write throughput on disk is shown. When the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed, the number of receive and send network calls are shown.
The last columns contain the accumulated occupation percentage for the chosen resource (default: CPU) and the user name.

Per program the following fields are shown: number of processes active or terminated during last interval (or in total if combined with command ’a’), accumulated CPU consumption during last interval in system and user mode, the current virtual and resident memory space consumed by active processes (or all processes of the user if combined with command ’a’).
When pcp-atop access metrics with root privileges, the accumulated read and write throughput on disk is shown. When the pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed, the number of receive and send network calls are shown.
The last columns contain the accumulated occupation percentage for the chosen resource (default: CPU) and the program name.

Per container (e.g. Docker/Podman) or pod (e.g. Kubernetes) the following fields are shown: number of processes active or terminated during last interval (or in total if combined with command ’a’), accumulated CPU consumption during last interval in system and user mode, the current virtual and resident memory space consumed by active processes (or all processes of the user if combined with command ’a’).
When pcp-atop access metrics with root privileges, the accumulated read and write throughput on disk is shown. When the pmdabbf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed, the number of receive and send network calls are shown.
The last columns contain the accumulated occupation percentage for the chosen resource (default: CPU) and the container/pod name (CID/POD).

This option remains valid until another sorting-order is explicitly selected again.
A sorting order for disk is only possible when pcp-atop runs with root privileges. A sorting-order for network is only possible when the pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed.

Miscellaneous interactive commands:

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

The pause key can be used in text mode and bar graph mode.

The interval can be modified in text mode and bar graph mode.

This key can be used in text mode and bar graph mode.

When viewing the contents of an archive folio, this key can be used to show the next sample from the folio.

This key can be used in text mode and bar graph mode.

This key can be used in text mode and bar graph mode.

This key can be used in text mode and bar graph mode.

When viewing the contents of an archive, this key can be used to rewind to the beginning of the file again.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

Whether this key is active or not can be seen in the header line.

For all mentioned resources the maximum number of lines can be specified interactively. When using the flag -l the maximum number of per-cpu lines is set to 0, the maximum number of disk lines to 5 and the maximum number of interface lines to 3. These values can be modified again in interactive mode.

This key can be used in text mode and bar graph mode.

With the arrow-down key the list can be scrolled downwards with single lines.

With the arrow-down key the list can be scrolled downwards with single lines.

With the arrow-up key the list can be scrolled upwards with single lines.

With the arrow-up key the list can be scrolled upwards with single lines.

PCP DATA STORAGE

In order to store system and process level statistics for long-term analysis (e.g. to check the system load and the active processes running yesterday between 3:00 and 4:00 PM), pcp-atop can store the system and process level statistics in the PCP archive format, as an archive folio (see mkaf(1)).
All information about processes and threads is stored in the archive.
The interval (default: 10 seconds) and number of samples (default: infinite) can be passed as last arguments. Instead of the number of samples, the flag -S can be used to indicate that pcp-atop should finish anyhow before midnight.

A PCP archive can be read and visualized again with the -r option. The argument is a comma-separated list of names, each of which may be the base name of an archive or the name of a directory containing one or more archives. If no argument is specified, the file $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/HOST/YYYYMMDD is opened for input (where YYYYMMDD are digits representing the current date, and HOST is the hostname of the machine being logged). If a filename is specified in the format YYYYMMDD (representing any valid date), the file $PCP_LOG_DIR/pmlogger/HOST/YYYYMMDD is opened. If a filename with the symbolic name y is specified, yesterday’s daily logfile is opened (this can be repeated so ’yyyy’ indicates the logfile of four days ago).
The samples from the file can be viewed interactively by using the key ’t’ to show the next sample, the key ’T’ to show the previous sample, the key ’b’ to branch to a particular time or the key ’r’ to rewind to the beginning of the file. These keys can be used in text mode as well as in bar graph mode.
When output is redirected to a file or pipe, pcp-atop prints all samples in plain ASCII. The default line length is 80 characters in that case. With the flag -L followed by an alternate line length, more (or less) columns will be shown.
With the flag -b (begin time) and/or -e (end time) followed by a time argument of the form [YYYYMMDD]hhmm[ss], a certain time period within the archive can be selected.

OUTPUT DESCRIPTION

The first sample shows the system level activity since boot (the elapsed time in the header shows the time since boot).

In text mode, pcp-atop first shows the lines related to system level activity for every sample. If a particular system resource has not been used during the interval, the entire line related to this resource is suppressed. So the number of system level lines may vary for each sample.
After that a list is shown of processes which have been active during the last interval. This list is by default sorted on CPU consumption, but this order can be changed by the keys which are previously described.

If values have to be shown by pcp-atop which do not fit in the column width, another format is used. If e.g. a CPU consumption of 233216 milliseconds should be shown in a column width of 4 positions, it is shown as ’233s’ (in seconds). For large memory figures, another unit is chosen if the value does not fit (Mb instead of Kb, Gb instead of Mb, Tb instead of Gb, etcetera). For other values, a kind of exponent notation is used (value 123456789 shown in a column of 5 positions gives 123e6).

OUTPUT DESCRIPTION - SYSTEM LEVEL

The system level information in text mode consists of the following output lines:

This line contains the total CPU time consumed in system mode (’sys’) and in user mode (’user’), the total number of processes present at this moment (’#proc’), the total number of threads present at this moment in state ’running’ (’#trun’), ’sleeping interruptible’ (’#tslpi’), ’sleeping uninterruptible’ (’#tslpu’) and ’idle’ (’#tidle’), the number of zombie processes (’#zombie’), the number of clone system calls (’clones’), and the number of processes that ended during the interval (’#exit’) when process accounting is used. Instead of ’#exit’ the last column may indicate that process accounting could not be activated (’no procacct’).
If the screen width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.

At least one line is shown for the total occupation of all CPUs together.
In case of a multi-processor system, an additional line is shown for every individual processor (with ’cpu’ in lower case), sorted on activity. Inactive CPUs will not be shown by default. The lines showing the per-cpu occupation contain the CPU number in the field combined with the wait percentage.

Every line contains the percentage of CPU time spent in kernel mode by all active processes (’sys’), the percentage of cpu time consumed in user mode (’user’) for all active processes (including processes running with a nice value larger than zero), the percentage of CPU time spent for interrupt handling (’irq’) including softirq, the percentage of unused CPU time while no processes were waiting for disk I/O (’idle’), and the percentage of unused CPU time while at least one process was waiting for disk I/O (’wait’).
In case of per-cpu occupation, the CPU number and the wait percentage (’w’) for that CPU. The number of lines showing the per-cpu occupation can be limited.

For virtual machines, the steal-percentage (’steal’) shows the percentage of CPU time stolen by other virtual machines running on the same hardware.
For physical machines hosting one or more virtual machines, the guest-percentage (’guest’) shows the percentage of CPU time used by the virtual machines. Notice that this percentage overlaps the user-percentage!

When PMC performance monitoring counters are supported by the CPU and the kernel (and pmdaperfevent(1) runs with root privileges), the number of instructions per CPU cycle (’ipc’) is shown. The first sample always shows the value ’initial’, because the counters are just activated at the moment that pcp-atop is started.
When the CPU busy percentage is high and the IPC is less than 1.0, it is likely that the CPU is frequently waiting for memory access during instruction execution (larger CPU caches or faster memory might be helpful to improve performance). When the CPU busy percentage is high and the IPC is greater than 1.0, it is likely that the CPU is instruction-bound (more/faster cores might be helpful to improve performance).
Furthermore, per CPU the effective number of cycles (’cycl’) is shown. This value can reach the current CPU frequency if such CPU is 100% busy. When an idle CPU is halted, the number of effective cycles can be (considerably) lower than the current frequency.
Notice that the average instructions per cycle and number of cycles is shown in the CPU line for all CPUs.
See also: http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-05-09/cpu-utilization-is-wrong.html

In case of frequency scaling, all previously mentioned CPU percentages are relative to the used scaling of the CPU during the interval. If a CPU has been active for e.g. 50% in user mode during the interval while the frequency scaling of that CPU was 40%, only 20% of the full capacity of the CPU has been used in user mode.
In case that the kernel module ’cpufreq_stats’ is active (after issuing ’modprobe cpufreq_stats’), the average frequency (’avgf’) and the average scaling percentage (’avgscal’) is shown. Otherwise the current frequency (’curf’) and the current scaling percentage (’curscal’) is shown at the moment that the sample is taken. Notice that average values for frequency and scaling are shown in the CPU line for every CPU.
Frequency scaling statistics are only gathered for systems with maximum 8 CPUs, since gathering of these values per CPU is very time consuming.

If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.

This line contains the load average figures reflecting the number of threads that are available to run on a CPU (i.e. part of the runqueue) or that are waiting for disk I/O. These figures are averaged over 1 (’avg1’), 5 (’avg5’) and 15 (’avg15’) minutes.
Furthermore the number of context switches (’csw’), the number of serviced interrupts (’intr’) and the number of available CPUs are shown.

If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.

Read the section GPU STATISTICS GATHERING in this document to find the details about the activation of the pmdanvidia daemon.

In the first column of every line, the bus-id (last nine characters) and the GPU number are shown. The subsequent columns show the percentage of time that one or more kernels were executing on the GPU (’gpubusy’), the percentage of time that global (device) memory was being read or written (’membusy’), the occupation percentage of memory (’memocc’), the total memory (’total’), the memory being in use at the moment of the sample (’used’), the average memory being in use during the sample time (’usavg’), the number of processes being active on the GPU at the moment of the sample (’#proc’), and the type of GPU.

If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.
The number of lines showing the GPUs can be limited.

These lines contain the total amount of physical memory (’tot’), the amount of memory which is currently free (’free’), the amount of memory that is available for new workloads without pushing the system into swap (’avail’), the amount of memory in use as page cache including the total resident shared memory (’cache’), the amount of memory within the page cache that has to be flushed to disk (’dirty’), the amount of memory used for filesystem meta data (’buff’), the amount of memory being used for kernel mallocs (’slab’), the amount of slab memory that is reclaimable (’slrec’), the resident size of SYSV shared memory including tmpfs but excluding static huge pages (’shmem’), the resident size of SYSV shared memory including static huge pages (’shrss’), the amount of SYSV shared memory that is currently swapped (’shswp’), the amount of memory that is currently used for page tables (’pgtab’), the number of NUMA nodes in this system (’numnode’), the amount of memory that is currently claimed by vmware’s balloon driver (’vmbal’), the amount of memory that is currently claimed by the ARC (cache) of ZFSonlinux (’zfarc’), the amount of memory for anonymous transparent huge pages (’anthp’), the amount of memory that is claimed for huge pages (’hptot’), the amount of huge page memory that is really in use (’hpuse’), the amount of memory that is used for TCP sockets (’tcps’), and the amount of memory that is used for UDP sockets (’udps’).

If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.

This line contains the total amount of swap space on disk (’tot’) and the amount of free swap space (’free’), the size of the swap cache (’swcac’), the size of compressed storage used for zswap (’zswap’), the real (decompressed) size of the pages stored in zswap (’zstor’), the total size of the memory used for KSM (’ksuse’, i.e. shared), and the total size of the memory saved (deduped) by KSM (’kssav’, i.e. sharing).
Furthermore the committed virtual memory space (’vmcom’) and the maximum limit of the committed space (’vmlim’, which is by default swap size plus 50% of memory size) is shown. The committed space is the reserved virtual space for all allocations of private memory space for processes. The kernel only verifies whether the committed space exceeds the limit if strict overcommit handling is configured (vm.overcommit_memory is 2).

This line contains the total memory bandwidth of LLC (’tot’), the bandwidth of the local NUMA node (’loc’), and the percentage of LLC in use (’LLCXX YY%’).

Note that this feature depends on the ’resctrl’ pseudo filesystem. Be sure that the kernel is built with the relevant config and take care that the pseudo-filesystem is mounted:  

mount -t resctrl resctrl -o mba_MBps /sys/fs/resctrl (on Intel)  
mount -t resctrl resctrl -o cdp      /sys/fs/resctrl (on AMD)

This line shows the total amount of physical memory of this node (’tot’), the amount of free memory (’free’), the amount of memory for cached file data (’file’), modified cached file data (’dirty’), recently used memory (’activ’), less recently used memory (’inact’), memory being used for kernel mallocs (’slab’), the amount of slab memory that is reclaimable (’slrec’), shared memory including tmpfs (’shmem’), total huge pages (’hptot’), used huge pages(’hpuse’), and the fragmentation percentage (’frag’).

This line shows the utilization percentages of all CPUs related to this NUMA node, categorized for system mode (’sys’), user mode (’user’), user mode for niced processes (’niced’), idle mode (’idle’), wait mode (’w’ preceded by the node number), irq mode (’irq’), softirq mode (’sirq’), steal mode (’steal’), and guest mode (’guest’) overlapping user mode.

This line contains the number of scanned pages (’scan’) due to the fact that free memory drops below a particular threshold, the number of times that the kernel tries to reclaim pages due to an urgent need (’stall’), the number of process stalls to run memory compaction to allocate huge pages (’compact’), the number of NUMA pages migrated (’numamig’), and the total number of memory pages migrated successfully e.g. between NUMA nodes or for compaction (’migrate’) are shown.
Also the number of memory pages the system read from block devices (’pgin’), the number of memory pages the system wrote to block devices (’pgout’), the number of memory pages swapped in from zswap (’zswin’), the number of memory pages swapped out to zswap (’zswout’), the number of memory pages the system read from swap space (’swin’), the number of memory pages the system wrote to swap space (’swout’), and the number of out-of-memory kills (’oomkill’).

This line contains percentages about resource pressure related to CPU, memory and I/O. Certain percentages refer to ’some’ meaning that some processes/threads were delayed due to resource overload. Other percentages refer to ’full’ meaning a loss of overall throughput due to resource overload.
The values ’cpusome’, ’memsome’, ’memfull’, ’iosome’ and ’iofull’ show the pressure percentage during the entire interval.
The values ’cs’ (cpu some), ’ms’ (memory some), ’mf’ (memory full), ´is’ (I/O some) and ’if’ (I/O full) each show three percentages separated by slashes: pressure percentage over the last 10, 60 and 300 seconds.

LVM/MDD/DSK

Logical volume/multiple device/disk utilization.
Per active unit one line is produced, sorted on unit activity. Such line shows the name (e.g. VolGroup00-lvtmp for a logical volume or sda for a hard disk), the percentage of elapsed time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (’busy’) (note that for devices serving requests in parallel, such as RAID arrays, SSD and NVMe, this number does not reflect their performance limits), the number of read requests issued (’read’), the number of write requests issued (’write’), the number of discard requests issued (’discrd’) if supported by kernel version, the number of KiBytes per read (’KiB/r’), the number of KiBytes per write (’KiB/w’), the number of KiBytes per discard (’KiB/d’) if supported by kernel version, the number of MiBytes per second throughput for reads (’MBr/s’), the number of MiBytes per second throughput for writes (’MBw/s’), requests issued to the device driver but not completed (’inflt’), the average queue depth (’avq’) and the average number of milliseconds needed by a request (’avio’) for seek, latency and data transfer.
If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.

The number of lines showing the units can be limited per class (LVM, MDD or DSK) with the ’l’ key or statically (see separate man-page of pcp-atoprc(5)). By specifying the value 0 for a particular class, no lines will be shown any more for that class.

For each NFS-mounted filesystem, a line is shown that contains the mounted server directory, the name of the server (’srv’), the total number of bytes physically read from the server (’read’) and the total number of bytes physically written to the server (’write’). Data transfer is subdivided in the number of bytes read via normal read() system calls (’nread’), the number of bytes written via normal read() system calls (’nwrit’), the number of bytes read via direct I/O (’dread’), the number of bytes written via direct I/O (’dwrit’), the number of bytes read via memory mapped I/O pages (’mread’), and the number of bytes written via memory mapped I/O pages (’mwrit’).

This line contains the number of RPC calls issues by local processes (’rpc’), the number of read RPC calls (’read’) and write RPC calls (’rpwrite’) issued to the NFS server, the number of RPC calls being retransmitted (’retxmit’) and the number of authorization refreshes (’autref’).

This line contains the number of RPC calls received from NFS clients (’rpc’), the number of read RPC calls received (’cread’), the number of write RPC calls received (’cwrit’), the number of Megabytes/second returned to read requests by clients (’MBcr/s’), the number of Megabytes/second passed in write requests by clients (’MBcw/s’), the number of network requests handled via TCP (’nettcp’), the number of network requests handled via UDP (’netudp’), the number of reply cache hits (’rchits’), the number of reply cache misses (’rcmiss’) and the number of uncached requests (’rcnoca’). Furthermore some error counters indicating the number of requests with a bad format (’badfmt’) or a bad authorization (’badaut’), and a counter indicating the number of bad clients (’badcln’).

One line is shown for activity of the transport layer (TCP and UDP), one line for the IP layer and one line per active interface.
For the transport layer, counters are shown concerning the number of received TCP segments including those received in error (’tcpi’), the number of transmitted TCP segments excluding those containing only retransmitted octets (’tcpo’), the number of UDP datagrams received (’udpi’), the number of UDP datagrams transmitted (’udpo’), the number of active TCP opens (’tcpao’), the number of passive TCP opens (’tcppo’), the number of TCP output retransmissions (’tcprs’), the number of TCP input errors (’tcpie’), the number of TCP output resets (’tcpor’), the number of UDP no ports (’udpnp’), the number of UDP input errors (’udpie’), and the number of TCP incorrect checksums (’csumie’).
If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.
These counters are related to IPv4 and IPv6 combined.

For the IP layer, counters are shown concerning the number of IP datagrams received from interfaces, including those received in error (’ipi’), the number of IP datagrams that local higher-layer protocols offered for transmission (’ipo’), the number of received IP datagrams which were forwarded to other interfaces (’ipfrw’), the number of IP datagrams which were delivered to local higher-layer protocols (’deliv’), the number of received ICMP datagrams (’icmpi’), and the number of transmitted ICMP datagrams (’icmpo’).
If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.
These counters are related to IPv4 and IPv6 combined.

For every active network interface one line is shown, sorted on the interface activity. Such line shows the name of the interface and its busy percentage in the first column. The busy percentage for half duplex is determined by comparing the interface speed with the number of bits transmitted and received per second; for full duplex the interface speed is compared with the highest of either the transmitted or the received bits. When the interface speed can not be determined (e.g. for the loopback interface), ’---’ is shown instead of the percentage.
Furthermore the number of received packets (’pcki’), the number of transmitted packets (’pcko’), the line speed of the interface (’sp’), the effective amount of bits received per second (’si’), the effective amount of bits transmitted per second (’so’), the number of collisions (’coll’), the number of received multicast packets (’mlti’), the number of errors while receiving a packet (’erri’), the number of errors while transmitting a packet (’erro’), the number of received packets dropped (’drpi’), and the number of transmitted packets dropped (’drpo’).
If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.
The number of lines showing the network interfaces can be limited.

For every active Infiniband port one line is shown, sorted on activity. Such line shows the name of the port and its busy percentage in the first column. The busy percentage is determined by taking the highest of either the transmitted or the received bits during the interval, multiplying that value by the number of lanes and comparing it against the maximum port speed.
Furthermore the number of received packets divided by the number of lanes (’pcki’), the number of transmitted packets divided by the number of lanes (’pcko’), the maximum line speed (’sp’), the effective amount of bits received per second (’si’), the effective amount of bits transmitted per second (’so’), and the number of lanes (’lanes’).
If the screen-width does not allow all of these counters, only a relevant subset is shown.
The number of lines showing the Infiniband ports can be limited.

OUTPUT DESCRIPTION - PROCESS LEVEL

Following the system level information, a list of processes is shown in text mode from which the resource utilization has changed during the last interval. These processes might have used CPU time or issued disk or network requests. However a process is also shown if part of it has been paged out due to lack of memory (while the process itself was in sleep state).

Per process the following fields may be shown (in alphabetical order), depending on the current output mode as described in the section INTERACTIVE COMMANDS and depending on the current width of your window:

This information will only be shown when the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed.

This information will only be shown when the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed.

If a process has been started and finished during the last interval, a ’?’ is shown because the container id or pod name is not part of the standard process accounting record.

This column will only be shown when atop runs with superuser privileges and when at least one containerized process is detected.

Behind the abbreviation ’CMD’ in the header line, the current page number and the total number of pages of the process/thread list are shown.

COMMAND-LINE

The full command line of the process (including arguments). If the length of the command line exceeds the length of the screen line, the arrow keys -> and <- can be used for horizontal scroll.

The ’-z <regex>’ command line option can be used to prepend matching environment variables to the displayed command line. POSIX Extended Regular Expression syntax are used (see regex(3)). When a matching environment variable is too long (exceeding the buffer that should contain the command line), it will be truncated.
Behind the verb ’COMMAND-LINE’ in the header line, the current page number and the total number of pages of the process/thread list are shown.

This information is shown when per process "storage accounting" is active in the kernel.

When the pmdanvidia daemon runs with root privileges, the GPU percentage reflects the GPU busy percentage.

When the pmdanvidia daemon does not run with root privileges, this value is not available.

When the pmdanvidia daemon does not run with root privileges, this value is not available.

This information will only be shown when the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ has been installed.

Every process shares resident memory with other processes. E.g. when a particular program is started several times, the code pages (text) are only loaded once in memory and shared by all incarnations. Also the code of shared libraries is shared by all processes using that shared library, as well as shared memory and memory-mapped files. For the PSIZE calculation of a process, the resident memory of a process that is shared with other processes is divided by the number of sharers. This means, that every process is accounted for a proportional part of that memory. Accumulating the PSIZE values of all processes in the system gives a reliable impression of the total resident memory consumed by all processes.
Since gathering of all values that are needed to calculate the PSIZE is a very time-consuming task, the ’R’ key (or ’-R’ flag) should be active. Gathering these values also requires superuser privileges (otherwise ’?K’ is shown in the output).

Unfortunately, the kernel aggregates the data transfer of a process to the data transfer of its parent process when terminating, so you might see transfers for (parent) processes like cron, bash or init, that are not really issued by them.

If a process has finished during the last interval, no value is shown since network counters are not part of the standard process accounting record.

The first position indicates if the process has been started during the last interval (the value N means ’new process’).

The second position indicates if the process has been finished during the last interval.
The value E means ’exit’ on the process’ own initiative; the exit code is displayed in the column ’EXC’.
The value S means that the process has been terminated unvoluntarily by a signal; the signal number is displayed in the in the column ’EXC’.
The value C means that the process has been terminated unvoluntarily by a signal, producing a core dump in its current directory; the signal number is displayed in the column ’EXC’.

Since determining the name string of the kernel function is a relatively time-consuming task, the ’W’ key (or ’-W’ flag) should be active.

Unfortunately, the kernel aggregates the data transfer of a process to the data transfer of its parent process when terminating, so you might see transfers for (parent) processes like cron, bash or init, that are not really issued by them.

PARSABLE OUTPUT

With the flag -P followed by a list of one or more labels (comma-separated), parsable output is produced for each sample. The labels that can be specified for system-level statistics correspond to the labels (first verb of each line) that can be found in the interactive output: "CPU", "cpu", "CPL", "GPU", "MEM", "SWP", "PAG", "PSI", "LVM", "MDD", "DSK", "NFM", "NFC", "NFS", "NET", "IFB", "LLC", "NUM" and "NUC".
For process-level statistics special labels are introduced: "PRG" (general), "PRC" (CPU), "PRE" (GPU), "PRM" (memory), "PRD" (disk, only if "storage accounting" is active) and "PRN" (only if the optional pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) netproc module is installed).
With the label "ALL", all system and process level statistics are shown.

The command and command line in the parsable output might contain spaces and are therefore by default surrounded by parenthesis. However, since a space is often used as separator between the fields by parsing tools, with the additional flag -Z it is possible to exchange the spaces in the command (line) by underscores and omit the parenthesis.

For every interval all requested lines are shown whereafter pcp-atop shows a line just containing the label "SEP" as a separator before the lines for the next sample are generated.
When a sample contains the values since boot, pcp-atop shows a line just containing the label "RESET" before the lines for this sample are generated.

The first part of each output-line consists of the following six fields: label (the name of the label), host (the name of this machine), epoch (the time of this interval as number of seconds since 1-1-1970), date (date of this interval in format YYYY/MM/DD), time (time of this interval in format HH:MM:SS), and interval (number of seconds elapsed for this interval).

The subsequent fields of each output-line depend on the label:

LVM/MDD/DSK

For every logical volume/multiple device/hard disk one line is shown.
Subsequent fields: name, number of milliseconds spent for I/O, number of reads issued, number of sectors transferred for reads, number of writes issued, number of sectors transferred for write, number of discards issued (-1 if not supported), number of sectors transferred for discards, number of requests currently in flight (not yet completed), and the average queue depth while the disk was busy.

Subsequent fields: the verb "upper", number of packets received by TCP, number of packets transmitted by TCP, number of packets received by UDP, number of packets transmitted by UDP, number of packets received by IP, number of packets transmitted by IP, number of packets delivered to higher layers by IP, number of packets forwarded by IP, number of input errors (UDP), number of noport errors (UDP), number of active opens (TCP), number of passive opens (TCP), number of passive opens (TCP), number of established connections at this moment (TCP), number of retransmitted segments (TCP), number of input errors (TCP), number of output resets (TCP), and number of checksum errors on received packets (TCP).

Next, one line is shown for every interface.
Subsequent fields: name of the interface, number of packets received by the interface, number of bytes received by the interface, number of packets transmitted by the interface, number of bytes transmitted by the interface, interface speed, and duplex mode (0=half, 1=full).

Subsequent fields: PID (unique ID of task), name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), state, real uid, real gid, TGID (group number of related tasks/threads), total number of threads, exit code (in case of fatal signal: signal number + 256), start time (epoch), full command line (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), PPID, number of threads in state ’running’ (R), number of threads in state ’interruptible sleeping’ (S), number of threads in state ’uninterruptible sleeping’ (D), effective uid, effective gid, saved uid, saved gid, filesystem uid, filesystem gid, elapsed time of terminated process (hertz), is_process (y/n), OpenVZ virtual pid (VPID), OpenVZ container id (CTID), container/pod name (CID/POD), indication if the task is newly started during this interval (’N’), cgroup v2 path name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), end time (epoch. or 0 if still active), and number of threads in state ’idle’ (I).

Subsequent fields: PID, name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), state, total number of clock-ticks per second for this machine, CPU-consumption in user mode (clockticks), CPU-consumption in system mode (clockticks), nice value, priority, realtime priority, scheduling policy, current CPU, sleep average, TGID (group number of related tasks/threads), is_process (y/n), runqueue delay in nanoseconds for this thread or for all threads (in case of process), wait channel of this thread (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), block I/O delay (clockticks), number of voluntary context switches, and number of involunatary context switches.

Subsequent fields: PID, name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), process state, GPU state (A for active, E for exited, N for no GPU user), number of GPUs used by this process, bitlist reflecting used GPUs, GPU busy percentage during interval, memory busy percentage during interval, memory occupation (KiB) at this moment cumulative memory occupation (KiB) during interval, and number of samples taken during interval.

Subsequent fields: PID, name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), state, page size for this machine (in bytes), virtual memory size (Kbytes), resident memory size (Kbytes), shared text memory size (Kbytes), virtual memory growth (Kbytes), resident memory growth (Kbytes), number of minor page faults, number of major page faults, virtual library exec size (Kbytes), virtual data size (Kbytes), virtual stack size (Kbytes), swap space used (Kbytes), TGID (group number of related tasks/threads), is_process (y/n), proportional set size (Kbytes) if in ’R’ option is specified and virtually locked memory space (Kbytes).

Subsequent fields: PID, name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), state, obsoleted kernel patch installed (’n’), standard io statistics used (’y’ or ’n’), number of reads on disk, cumulative number of sectors read, number of writes on disk, cumulative number of sectors written, cancelled number of written sectors, TGID (group number of related tasks/threads), obsoleted value (’n’), and is_process (y/n).

Subsequent fields: PID, name (between parenthesis or underscores for spaces), state, pmdabpf(1) or pmdabcc(1) module ’netproc’ loaded (’y’ or ’n’), number of tcp_sendmsg() calls, cumulative size of TCP buffers requested to be transmitted, number of tcp_recvmsg()/tcp_cleanup_rbuf() calls, cumulative size of TCP buffers received, number of udp_sendmsg() calls, cumulative size of UDP buffers requested to be transmitted, number of udp_recvmsg()/skb_consume_udp() calls, cumulative size of UDP buffers transmitted, number of raw packets transmitted (obsolete, always 0), number of raw packets received (obsolete, always 0), TGID (group number of related tasks/threads) and is_process (y/n).

SIGNALS

By sending the SIGUSR1 signal to pcp-atop a new sample will be forced, even if the current timer interval has not exceeded yet. The behavior is similar to pressing the ’t’ key in an interactive session.

By sending the SIGUSR2 signal to pcp-atop a final sample will be forced after which pcp-atop will terminate.

EXAMPLES

To monitor the current system load interactively with an interval of (default) 10 seconds:

To monitor the system load as bar graphs with an interval of 5 seconds:  
pcp atop -B 5

Store information about the system and process activity in a PCP archive folio with an interval of ten minutes during an hour:  
pcp atop -w /tmp/pcp-atop 600 6

View the contents of this file interactively:  

pcp atop -r /tmp/pcp-atop

View the processor and disk utilization of this file in parsable format:  

pcp atop -PCPU,DSK -r /tmp/pcp-atop.folio

View the contents of today’s standard logfile interactively:  

pcp atop -r

View the contents of the standard logfile of the day before yesterday interactively:  

pcp atop -r yy

View the contents of the standard logfile of 2023, June 7 from 02:00 PM onwards interactively:  

pcp atop -r 20230607 -b 14:00

To monitor the system load and write it to a file (in plain ASCII) with an interval of one minute during half an hour with active processes sorted on memory consumption:  
pcp atop -M 60 30 > /log/pcp-atop.mem

NOTES

pcp-atop is based on the source code of the atop(1) command from https://atoptool.nl, maintained by Gerlof Langeveld (gerlof.langeveld [AT] atoptool.nl), and aims to be command line and output compatible with it as much as possible.

Some features of pcp-atop (such as reporting on the Apache HTTP daemon, Infiniband, NFS client mounts, hardware event counts, GPU statistics and per-process TCP and UDP statistics) are only activated if the corresonding PCP metrics are available. Refer to the documentation for pmdaapache(1), pmdainfiniband(1), pmdanfsclient(1), pmdanvidia(1), pmdaperfevent(1) pmdabcc(1) and pmdabpf(1) for further details on activating these metrics.

The semantics of the per-process network statistics deviate slightly from the atop(1) tool: instead of the number of TCP/UDP packets sent/received (which may be inaccurate due to TCP segmentation offload), pcp-atop shows the number of tcp_sendmsg()/udp_sendmsg()/etc. kernel calls per process.

FILES

/etc/atoprc

Configuration file containing system-wide default values. For further information about the default values, refer to the pcp-atoprc(5) man page).

~/.atoprc

Configuration file containing personal default values. For further information about the default values, refer to the pcp-atoprc(5) man page).

PCP ENVIRONMENT

Environment variables with the prefix PCP_ are used to parameterize the file and directory names used by PCP. On each installation, the file /etc/pcp.conf contains the local values for these variables. The $PCP_CONF variable may be used to specify an alternative configuration file, as described in pcp.conf(5).

For environment variables affecting PCP tools, see pmGetOptions(3).

SEE ALSO

PCPIntro(1), pcp(1), pcp-atopsar(1), pmdaapache(1), pmdabcc(1), pmdabpf(1), pmdainfiniband(1), pmdanfsclient(1), pmdanvidia(1), pmdaproc(1), mkaf(1), pmlogger(1), pmlogger_daily(1) and pcp-atoprc(5).