37.4 Summary
Even a system that appears to be doing nothing will have many system processes running in the background. Activities performed by users on the system will result in additional processes being started. Processes can also spawn their own child processes. Each of these processes will use some amount of system resources including memory, swap space, processor cycles, disk storage and network bandwidth. This chapter has explored a set of tools that can be used to monitor both process and system resources on a running system and, when necessary, kill errant processes that may be impacting the performance of a system.
