Performance Monitoring with top
The easiest process-monitoring utility around is top, so named because it was originally designed to list the top-ten processes currently running on the system, in descending order of CPU usage. These days, however, FreeBSD's top, by default, shows you every process currently running, whatever state it's in. On a freshly installed FreeBSD system, this will usually be somewhere around 30 processes.
The benefit that top provides is that it's interactive and real-time. When you run it, it takes over your terminal and udpates itself every second, giving you instantaneous information about the state of the system at that moment. You can also pass it commands, such as the kill or renice commands (covered later in this ...
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