Find System Hogs and Child Processes
There are a lot of tools out there that can help you to do this that are both GUI or command line-based but sometimes you’re on a production server that may have limited tools and sometimes the simplest tools are best in cases like this.
List the processes that are not owned by you that are using a lot of CPU:
$ ps aux --sort=-%cpu | grep -m 8 -vwhoami
or by memory:
$ ps aux --sort=-%mem | grep -m 8 -vwhoami
or by longest running process:
$ ps aux --sort=-time | grep -m 8 -vwhoami
List processes by a specific user:
$ ps -U gszumo
or multiple users:
$ ps -U gszumo -U katy
You can see child proceses:
$ ps -eo pid,args --forest
or children of a specific process:
$ ps -f --ppid 4775
I don’t remember where I found these tips but they have come in handy on many occasions and I am documenting them here hoping that readers (whatever few there are) will also benefit from them.