11.2. The Running Processes Module

This module can be used to view, kill, re-prioritize and run processes on your system. When you enter it for the first time from the System category, the main page will display a tree of processes as shown in Figure 11.1.

The module has several different ways of viewing all the processes on your system, selectable by the Display links at the top of the main page. They are:

PID In this display mode each process is shown indented under its parent, forming a tree of all the processes running on your system. At the top of the tree is the init command, which is started by the kernel at boot time and so has no parent.

User This mode groups processes by their owner. It can be useful on systems with many users for seeing at a glance what each user is running.

Memory In this mode, processes are ordered by the amount of memory they are using up, with those using the most memory shown at the top of the page. A process's memory usage is not always indicative of the amount of memory it is really using, because processes often share memory with each other.

In addition, the total and free amount of real and virtual memory on your system is displayed above the process list.

CPU This display mode orders processes by their current CPU usage, with the heaviest user appearing first. Sometimes the Webmin command that generates the page will appear near the top of the list, but it can be safely ignored.

The system load averages will be displayed at the top of the page, to give some idea of how busy the system has been over the last 1, 5, and 10 minutes. An average of 0 means no activity at all, 1 means the CPU is fully utilized, and anything above 1 means that there are more processes wanting to run than the system has CPU time for.

The Search and Run options are for searching for processes and running new ones, respectively. See the following sections for more details.