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6

The widget iStat Pro allows to monitor different system stats like

  • CPU usage
  • network bandwidth in/out
  • memory usage
  • ...

How can I view such system stats in the Terminal?

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5 Answers

up vote 29 down vote accepted

Depending on what you want to see, there are several options on Terminal level:

  • top: show running processes, memory usage and similar stats
  • iostat: show I/O per terminal, device and SPU summery statistics
  • vm_stat: show Mach virtual memory statistics
  • df and diskutil list: report on drive space used and free
  • fs_usage: show file activity for both disk and network
  • nettop: display updated information about the network (a bit like top for net I/O)
  • w: display who is logged in, what they are doing and system load
  • ifconfig and ipconfig: network interface and IP protocol details

Most of these commands have a huge list of options, it's probably best to consult the man pages for details.

I usually rely on top -u -s 10 to identify cpu hugging processes and fs_usage -f filesys/fs_usage -f network to identify processes generating a lot of disk/network load.

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This is what I wanted! Thanks. – gentmatt Feb 5 '12 at 19:25
up vote 2 down vote

You can use top. It'll show CPU & RAM usage together with all the processes. It'll also show you network packets in/out, and discs data read/written.

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2  
And with man top you can see how to customize the output. – Rene Larsen Feb 5 '12 at 13:13
up vote 1 down vote

The above are great commands. Also, I like to use

du -ks *

To show how much disk space all the folders below my current directory are using.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you are having network problems, especially with a server exposed to the Internet, lsof(1) can be extremely useful. It lists all open files.

For example, lsof | fgrep '/Library/WebServer/ will show you all the files that are open on your web server. I've been using this a lot to find and ban "leeches" and "bots" who are reducing my bandwidth by automatically sucking down file after file.

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up vote 0 down vote

Here are two commands for determining your local and public IP:

Local IP

ipconfig getifaddr en1

This is when using Wi-Fi. For ethernet use en0.

Public IP

curl whatismyip.org
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1  
On current MacBook Airs (which don't have an ethernet port) the Wi-Fi device code is en0. You can find out what it is with networksetup -listallhardwareports | grep -E '(Wi-Fi|AirPort)' -A 1 | grep -o "en.". – Lauri Ranta Feb 23 '12 at 23:05

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