Task manager and system monitoring in Intro to Computing - Practice Problems & Coding Challenges

Challenge - 5 Problems

💻 Command Output

intermediate

Identify the output of the 'top' command snapshot

Given the following snapshot from the top command on a Linux system, what is the value of the CPU usage percentage for the user processes (us)?

top - 15:20:01 up 1 day,  3:45,  2 users,  load average: 0.15, 0.10, 0.05
Tasks: 150 total,   1 running, 149 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  5.0 us,  2.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 92.0 id,  1.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
Mem:   8000000k total,  2000000k used,  6000000k free,   500000k buffers
Swap:  2000000k total,        0k used,  2000000k free,  1000000k cached

A 2.0%

B 5.0%

C 92.0%

D 1.0%

💡 Hint

Look for the '%Cpu(s):' line and find the 'us' value which stands for user CPU usage.

The 'us' value in the '%Cpu(s):' line shows the percentage of CPU used by user processes. Here it is 5.0%.

🧠 Conceptual

intermediate

Understanding process states in a task manager

Which of the following process states indicates that a process is currently executing on the CPU?

A Sleeping

B Stopped

C Zombie

D Running

💡 Hint

Think about which state means the process is actively doing work.

A process in the 'Running' state is actively executing on the CPU. 'Sleeping' means waiting, 'Zombie' means terminated but not cleaned, and 'Stopped' means paused.

❓ Troubleshoot

advanced

Diagnosing high memory usage with 'ps' command

You run the command ps aux --sort=-%mem | head -5 to find processes using the most memory. Which option correctly describes what this command does?

A Lists all processes sorted by memory usage descending, showing top 5

B Lists all processes sorted by CPU usage ascending, showing top 5

C Lists all processes sorted by process ID ascending, showing top 5

D Lists only 5 processes with highest CPU usage

💡 Hint

Look at the options: --sort=-%mem means sort by memory descending.

The command lists all processes sorted by memory usage in descending order and shows the top 5 lines, helping identify high memory consumers.

🔀 Workflow

advanced

Sequence to monitor and kill a high CPU process

What is the correct order of commands to find a process consuming high CPU and terminate it safely?

A 2,1,3,4

B 1,3,2,4

C 1,2,3,4

D 1,4,2,3

💡 Hint

First find the process, then try gentle kill, check, then force kill if needed.

The correct workflow is to identify the process, send a gentle termination signal, confirm it stopped, and if not, force kill it.

✅ Best Practice

expert

Choosing the best tool for continuous system monitoring

Which tool is best suited for continuous, real-time monitoring of system metrics with alerting capabilities in a production environment?

A Nagios

B htop

C ps

D kill

💡 Hint

Consider tools designed for monitoring and alerting, not just viewing or managing processes.

Nagios is designed for continuous monitoring with alerting, while htop and ps are interactive tools and kill is for terminating processes.