Btop sufficient to replace Top/htop

Posted by RandomXUsr@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 27 comments

I've been using btop in place of traditional top and htop.

Seems to work well to identify possible resource issues or manage processes by hand occasionally.

Do you all have a preference? And is btop acceptable to use in the enterprise?

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broknbottle@reddit

PCP and Below are superior

https://github.com/facebookincubator/below

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atop has an advantage of being able to run for a timeframe, save to a file, then be examined later. This is great for tracking things down, especially intermittent things, and can be used on a set of machines easily. So it scales much better in an enterprise setting than more one-off interactive tools. So btop has its place and looks good for those use cases, but don't forget that we have a huge toolbox available and sometimes you want a different tool for a use case.

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Impossible-graph@reddit

Real geeks use CLI tools. No need for your fancy TUIs /s

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Smooth_Signal_3423@reddit

What problems does btop solve that htop does not?

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JackDostoevsky@reddit

it looks prettier?

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Hotshot55@reddit

Further, what does htop do that top does not? I find most people try to replace top because they don't want to take any time to learn how the tool works.

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juggernaut911@reddit

Is it enough that it can look pretty nice? screenshot

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Hotshot55@reddit

I'm not saying htop is a bad tool in any way. You just probably don't need it.

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doubled112@reddit

I like htop's default better. That's about it.

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Hotshot55@reddit

That's somewhat my point, top is usually just going to be there and htop, for the vast majority of people, just displays the same data slightly differently.

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doubled112@reddit

htop does (or did) have a few things top didn't. I agree they're interchangeable for the vast majority.

Off the top of my head, I don't believe top will show CPU temperature and frequency? htop can. Completely useless on a virtual server but might be useful on a physical server/desktop.

Colours help a lot of people too.

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Backplague@reddit

htop's colorful bar gauges are a lot more readable to me than top's rows of numbers one after another. htop also has mouse support (yeah yeah sue me for using the mouse in the terminal)

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Smooth_Signal_3423@reddit

Or, as in my case, htop was so considered the "standard" when I was learning linux that I never felt I needed to learn it.

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juggernaut911@reddit

Is it enough that it can look pretty nice? screenshot

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gribbler@reddit

GPU information: working in VFX is very helpful. I've not looked into if htop can, but our artists prefer how pretty btop is

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Fr0gm4n@reddit

History. btop has running graphs of the state instead of just the most current like top/htop.

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RandomXUsr@reddit (OP)

It easier for me to read. Easier on the eyes I suppose.

And the output makes more sense for myself.

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mgedmin@reddit

I kind of like htop. I miss top's "hide idle tasks" mode (i) that htop doesn't have.

I sometimes use atop, because it shows a lot, and focuses on bottlenecks. It's output is hard to read, and the UI is a bit clumsy. Its history rewinding facilities are fabulous and unique.

I haven't seen btop before. At first glance it seems to be valuing aesthetics over usability, but maybe I'll change my mind if I try to use it for longer.

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RandomXUsr@reddit (OP)

It has some nice key bindings. Btop that is.

Easily switch to treeview. The fonts are a bit larger by default and the colors help.

T for tree view F for find K to kill a process.

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mgedmin@reddit

It's a terminal application, how can the font size be different from any other terminal application?

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shulemaker@reddit

Since asked about the enterprise:

If you’re looking at top on a sever, you probably just logged in to find out why something was slow, due to an alert or complaint. You’re starting out looking for top resource usage. Now is not the time to fiddle with installing something (and possibly making an unstable system even worse). Historical graphs are handled by external monitoring, so there is no need to double up on that.

top, vmstat, iostat, and iotop are all much more likely to be useful in the moment when troubleshooting during an ongoing incident.

If you want to preinstall this where you can, go ahead, but it’s much better to be proficient with standard tools, especially when you log onto an old box, appliance, or something not under your control.

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TuxRuffian@reddit

They serve two completely different purposes. My tmux sessions have a tab that runs htop and another that runs btop (w/o the process window).

btop is more of a glances/conky/bottom replacement where you can get a quick overview of the system. View combined network activity, combined RAM utilization, disk utilization, etc.

htop is more akin to top in that focuses on processes only, but adds several interactive commands for a given process like strace, lsof, renice, or ionice. It is still the best TUI for process management IMHO and has been since I started w/Linux over 20 years ago.

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