Assigning a button for top or htop.

indiajoe · 03-10-2012, 04:36 PM

When some program chocks the CPU or memory to 100%, the keyboard too hangs.
I want to assign a button (like the lid close button or power button) for calling top or htop with nice -20 so that i can kill the application.
The script which keeps watch of this event has be running with -20 nice number.
Is this a good idea to implement? Any ideas?

-cheers
indiajoe

TB0ne · 03-10-2012, 04:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by indiajoe

When some program chocks the CPU or memory to 100%, the keyboard too hangs.
I want to assign a button (like the lid close button or power button) for calling top or htop with nice -20 so that i can kill the application.
The script which keeps watch of this event has be running with -20 nice number.
Is this a good idea to implement? Any ideas?

Doesn't make alot of sense to me. If the keyboard hangs, then ANY key/button on your system will also be affected and hang. You could just use whatever your GUI manager (Gnome/KDE) keyboard settings to program a key to run whatever script you want, but again, if the keyboard hangs, that will ALSO hang, so you're right back where you started.

indiajoe · 03-11-2012, 03:26 AM

I was thinking of situations when it is not completely hung. Mostly my system only gets extremely slow. So do you think that running a script which watches for a particular key stroke and run top with nice -20 will be as good as assigning it to any other button on my laptop?
(Many a times i have noticed that the power button starts shutdown even when my keyboard is responding very slow)
Thanking you,
indiajoe

unSpawn · 03-11-2012, 06:00 AM

Linux is quite efficient in how it utilizes and shares available resources among processes. Instead of searching for a way to kill processes you should find out what is or are the bottlenecks and how to make those processes play nice (more RAM, review processor and disk energy-saving states, different type of scheduler, process niceness, ionice, running certain processes sequentially like cronjobs, etc, etc). Basic tools to gather resource statistics (aka SAR) are Atop, Dstat and collectl.