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Credible nerd says stop using atop, doesn't say why, everyone panics
Quoting: It might be a good time to temporarily uninstall atop —
Atop is a system monitoring tool for Linux and FreeBSD, and most distros include it in their repositories. It's been around for years and the last release, version 2.11.0, was out in June last year. Even Red Hat has recommended it in the past.
Atop is in the family of the well-known top command. "TOP" stands for "table of processes" – at least colloquially – and it's a sort of task manager for the Unix shell. It shows you a live, constantly updating list of the most active processes running on your computer, which you can sort by various criteria, such as CPU or memory usage. Pretty much all Unix-like OSes include the top command, and there are a bunch of similar ones, including the popular htop by Hisham Muhammad, co-creator of Reg FOSS desk favorite GoboLinux, and btop++, which we recently used to demonstrate the tiny resource usage of Pi-hole.
Followup:
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Turns out it was just a bug in Atop after all • The Register
Rachel Kroll has clarified the Atop alarm: Turns out it was just a weird little bug, and it's probably already been fixed.
The veteran sysadmin, industry observer, and commentator, who blogs as rachelbythebay, posted an update about the odd behavior in the atop command, which she warned about on Wednesday.
Atop is a system and process-level resource monitoring tool primarily designed for Linux. It is included in the package repositories of most major Linux distributions, although it is not typically installed by default.