qps and htop
August 2nd, 2007 by webstersprodigy
ps, top, kill, and nice are all pretty nice. There are some very nice tools out there though that serve basically the same purpose.
qps
This program is pretty neat. It allows you to see most of the output from ps. It also orders it in many ways that are visually easy to see (like in a tree-like structure).
I liked some logical information. I always tend to forget how long the load averages are averaged over, but in qps they are clearly labeled. There are many option and it is a very nice, easy to use tool. If there were one advantage over qps it would be that – easy to use.
The main disadvantages I noticed were 1. It requires X to run and 2. I noticed it lacks some features of ps, such as displaying the SELinux context (ps -z).
htop
htop is good enough that on most of my systems I found it as a suitable replacement to top. It is prettier, adds some features, and I would argue it takes away nothing.
I like that things are listed by color and options are listed right at the bottom.
I don’t think it’s as powerful as qps, but it doesn’t require X to run. The only disadvantage of htop when compared to top in my opinion is that htop is not installed by default on most linux distributions while top is.