A field guide to every number in htop, from load average to zombies (peteris.rocks)
The 2019 explainer decodes every field in htop and top: load average as a damped average of runnable plus uninterruptible tasks, not CPU percent, and the S-state column from R to the unkillable D and the harmless Z zombie.
Its sharpest point: VIRT is an illusion. RES is the real resident memory; virtual size counts mmap'd regions a process never touches.
The comments turned it into a tools thread: btop, nmon, process-tree tweaks.
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