I feel like I have too many processes running that I don't really need...For Windows there is a website that I use for checking whether specific running processes are necessary. Search results for processes on this site include a description of what the process is for. Is there such a site for Linux processes? I want to get rid of the clutter running on my computer...if there is any. Thank you!

Hi there,

I don't know if I understand your question right??? You would like to know what process are running on your Linux box. If so, there are many different possibilities, like will take a "snapshot" of all the process running. Otherwise, you can run which gives the process running, in a continual matter.

You can run these from a command line terminal.

Cheers

An entry in the process-table is a fairly insignificant thing as long as the process is not gobbling up CPU time or other resources. Proceed carefully, and seriously consider whether to proceed at all.

Probably the most useful thing to do is to review the list of "services" (Linux calls them daemons) which are set to run on your computer. The principle is exactly the same as "cleaning up the cruft" in a Windows installation. Many "stock distros" include a large number of running processes that you might not actually need in your situation, because they wish to make installation as simple as possible. Perhaps you will never run a database-server or a web-server on your box ... may never find yourself part of a Windows printer-network ... and so on. You can selectively stop those daemons and prevent them from starting the next time you boot.

I'm not going to say how you do that, because this varies from system to system (and can in fact be accomplished in several ways depending on your personal level of technical experience).

Remember, again, to proceed carefully, and be certain that you understand why you are taking any particular action that you take. The inter-relationship of subsystems can be quite subtle, and the consequences of change can be far-reaching.

You can look at this suse tweak guide.. it gives an indication of what a lot of the processes are that you need to leave running..

Of course kill the obvious ones if you don't use them.. apache, mysql, postgresql, etc...

Debian used to install netatalk by default.. I don't own any Macs, nor do I have the appletalk protocol running on any of my networks.. this was an easy one to remove from the system entirely..

I don't like services that scan for automated services on my network. avahi-daemon can be set to not run at startup..

Yep theres a lot of stuff that just plain isn't needed that gets installed by default so things will 'just work' since that is what most users complain about.. In windows this just works..!! So Linux starts to gather a bunch of junk by default that a lot of Users just plain don't need. One of the reasons I like Debian is that I can do a base install then manually add what I want while avoiding the automated installation of all that junk I just don't use.

ps -x => Will give you the list of processes

kill -9 <enter the process id of the process you want to kill>


That should do the trick