Question

Need some clarification on the following:

I am currently working on an assignment with the following question:

- Identify the commands that are generally causing the highest load on your system and discuss your perspectives on why they cause such a load. Discuss your perspectives on the considerations system administration must give while using these commands.

In my research, I can only find linux commands used to identify high loads on a linux system, but as we can see the question seems ask us to identify the commands that are causing the highest load, and then explain why from the perspective of a system admin.

Can someone clarify this for me?

Answer 1

In any linux system, you can find out the commands which takes up the highest load on the system using the following command -

ps -eo pid,ppid,cmd,%mem,%cpu --sort=-%mem | head

The above command sorts the list of all processes in descending order of memory and cpu load.

In general, processes which require high graphical support consumes large amount of resources and memory. For example, you will find that /usr/lib/firefox/firefox command or equivalent for chrome command, will use the most amount of memory and the larger the number of tabs, the larger the usage.

From a system admin's point of view, this happens because running high end graphical applications require large amount of computations and your cpu can't take that much load. Hence, a gpu is required to perform the same.

Also, training machine learning models on huge datasets will also consume large amount of memory. This is so because it has to process through large number of rows and columns and compute several metrics using them.

Apart from this, if you are running any application which uses cloud, it would also grab a large share of your memory and cpu usage because it requires constant connected to network and renders data almost every second from the network.