tail -f findings.out

For quite some time, I have wanted to use conky on my Linux desktop. The screenshots were incredible. All the best looking and informative Linux desktops I have seen use it. But whenever I tried to follow the tutorials, the example config files produced terrible looking results. The config options were legion, and I just didn’t have the time to figure it out. So I stayed with SysMonitor.

Today, I took a few hours and played with the config. The results were a big improvement:

Continue Reading “Gorgeous and useful information: Configuring conky”

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):

The

shows the ancestral relationships between processes running on a machine. What does that mean? It means you can see an awesome tree of what’s running on your box, instead of the boring output of ps. Check it:

It compresses multiple descendants into a single entry, with the number of descendents (like for apache2 and mysqld here). You can also have it search by user, pid, and more. See the man page for exact details.

Other nice features are being able to highlight certain processes and show command line arguments. So if you wanted to see how the latest apache2 process was called, you could run

pgrep -n apache2 | xargs -I mystr pstree -apH mystr

and get back:

This isn’t a particularly interesting example, but if you knew one of a number of scripts might be causing MySQL to act up, for instance, you could call their names in the pgrep search, and quickly see who called it.

Top is a very handy and common application. But there is always room for improvement, even in common and simple programs. In this case, meet htop. It performs a similar function to top, viz. showing you what is using your system’s CPU, memory, or other resources. However, htop presents this information is a much friendlier graphical way.

On Ubuntu, install is a snap. Make sure you have the universe repos enabled, and then run

.

And no more obscure commands to remember for configuring layout and appearance. There is a handy list of commands at the bottom of the display. In addition, that display is in a wide range of handy colors (also configurable of course). The whole presentation is easier to read, and a lot easier to customize.

As mentioned, there are a lot of options for htop. Once you configure things and exit htop, your changes are saved to a .htoprc in your home directory. To see the basic options I have set, you can check out my .htoprc.

I like to have top (and now htop) running in the top left of my dual monitor setup. Using fluxbox, this is rather easy. See my .fluxbox startup and apps files.