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Show processes with the highest CPU usage

harmlessProcessesdebian, ubuntu
user@server
ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head -15

Prints all processes sorted by CPU share in descending order and shows the first 14 plus the header line. Unlike top, the output is suitable for pasting into a ticket or for scripts. On web servers, typical candidates are php-fpm, mariadbd or lsphp; on Plesk, the USER column reveals the affected subscription.

Note: %CPU is the average over the process’s entire lifetime, not the current value. For the momentary load, top -b -n 1 -o %CPU | head -20 is more accurate.

Also searched as

  • which process is eating the cpu
  • server slow high cpu load
  • show cpu hogs
  • top processes by cpu

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$ps -C apache2 --no-headers | wc -l
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Compare load average with the number of CPU cores

$uptime && nproc
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Count processes per user

$ps -eo user= | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
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Find zombie processes and their parent processes

$ps -eo pid,ppid,stat,cmd | awk 'NR == 1 || $3 ~ /^Z/'
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Show processes as a tree with parents and children

$ps -ef --forest
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Show processes with the highest RAM usage

$ps -eo pid,user,%mem,rss,cmd --sort=-rss | head -15
harmlessProcesses

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