Probably my all-time favorite is top. Even with commands like prstat and sar on some of the systems I use routinely, top is there with a quick answer and is nearly, if not completely, ubiquitous. A quick check of a system with top tells me a lot about the system’s performance. And, of all the output available through top, the load average gives me some of the best insights. If see something like this on the top line of my top output, I know the system is carrying a very light load. The one-, five, and fifteen-minute load averages provide a quick glimpse into whether processes are queueing up for access to the CPU. With numbers like these, I can tell that a process is waiting only once in a while — maybe every 8th or 3rd time the system checks. I can also tell that the load is getting a little lighter (though keep in mind that the past 15 minutes doesn’t give us a very long time span to examine).
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