Top for Apache activity

While top can show you that yes, it is Apache that is taking up all your server’s resources, what can you do to narrow down the activity to a particular site being served on the box? You could tail the access_log, but on anything but a slow server, that leads more to blindess than enlightenment. And perhaps you want something a little more current than utilities that can chew through Apache log files and give you stats.

In looking for this, I came across Apachetop. This handy little utility parses your log files and gives you all sorts of configurable stats in real time, in a clean CLI human readable interface. This article over at HowToGeek does a great job describing how to install it (in most package handlers), use it, and configure it, so I won’t re-hash it all here. Here’s some example output (updating as soon as activity occurs of course):