Filed under CLI | by Samuel Huckins | Date Posted: December 6, 2008 - 12:58 AM

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):