Explore and control live system processes with a fast interactive viewer. 16.11.2025 | reading time: 2 min When a system feels slow or a service misbehaves, `htop` gives an immediate, interactive picture of CPU, memory and process activity so he can find and act on the culprit in seconds. Kill a runaway process Start `htop`, spot the offending process and terminate it; a simple session looks like this:\n```bash\n$ htop\nPID USER PRI NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND\n4721 builder 20 0 134M 23M 8M S 85.3 1.2 12:34.56 my-worker\n2030 root 20 0 45M 3M 2M S 2.0 0.1 0:01.23 sshd\n```\nThen press F3 to search for 'my-worker', press F9 to send a signal (for example 9 for SIGKILL), and confirm to stop it. Powerful shortcuts Use F3 to search, F4 to filter, F5 to toggle tree view, F6 to change sort column, F7/F8 to nice/renice and F2 to customize meters; from the shell he can also restrict view with `htop -u username` to show one user or `htop -p PID` to follow specific PIDs. When deeper inspection is needed htop excels at quick, live triage, but he may switch to `ps` for scripted snapshots, to `strace` for syscall traces or to `lsof` to list open files when investigating a process more deeply; combine tools rather than relying on a single view. Next steps Practice common workflows until they are reflex, then add `htop` into your incident toolkit and learn complementary commands for scripted monitoring; consider formalizing skills with certifications like CompTIA Linux+ or LPIC-1 and intensive exam preparation at bitsandbytes.academy. Join Bits & Bytes Academy First class LINUX exam preparation. processes utilities troubleshooting
