Identification
To identify CPU/Memory intensive processes in Linux, you can use the top command, ps command or the htop command, which is an enhanced version of top.
top command
You can simply type top in your terminal, and it will give you a live scrolling view of the current processes and their CPU/Memory utilization.
ps command
You can use the ps command along with aux and sort to identify the most CPU/Memory intensive processes:
ps aux --sort=-%cpu
ps aux --sort=-%mem
The above commands will sort the processes according to CPU and memory usage respectively.
htop command
If htop is installed on your system, you can simply type htop in your terminal. It gives you a more user-friendly and colorful interface compared to top.
Kill process
Once you’ve identified the process you want to kill, you can do so with the kill command followed by the PID (Process ID), or with the pkill command followed by the process name.
For example, if a process has a PID of 1234, you can use the following command to kill it:
kill 1234
If the process does not respond to the kill command, you can use the -9 option (SIGKILL) to forcefully kill the process:
kill -9 1234
Alternatively, if the process name is “example”, you can use the following command to kill it:
pkill example
