"Hardware is getting amazingly fast. But sometimes it seems like software gets slower faster than hardware speeds up. So why do so many apps feel poky?
"In this series, I'll look at some of the ways you can examine your system to see what's taking up resources, and offer some tips on slimming your system down so it runs faster.
"I'll start with two of the basic command-line applications for measuring performance: top and ps.
top
"When you suspect something is running away with system resources, top should be your first recourse. It gives you a screen that updates every couple of seconds (Figure 1), showing you a list of the processes that are hogging the most CPU."
