LATENCYTOP(8)

🌸 LATENCYTOP(8) — the system manager's manual, but make it cute

okay bestie, pull up a chair, we're talking about latencytop 💖 (it lives in section 8 of the manual, iykyk)

---

✨ NAME ✨

latencytop — a tool for developers to visualize system latencies 🦋

---

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

latencytop [--unknown] [processes...]

---

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so this page is the quick lil rundown of the latencytop command 💅 it's not the whole novel, it's the sparknotes, periodt.

latencytop is a Linux* tool made for software developers — and yes that means both kernel devs and userspace devs, everybody's invited to the party 🎀 — and its whole thing is figuring out where in the system latency is happening, and what kind of operation/action is causing that latency to happen. why do we care? because once you know, you can actually change the code and dodge the worst latency hiccups. iconic behavior honestly. 👑

LatencyTOP is obsessed (affectionately) with the cases where an application wants to run and execute useful code, but some resource it needs isn't available right now — and so the kernel just... blocks the process. rude, but okay. 💀 and this gets done on two levels:

• on a system level — the whole big picture
• and on a per process level — one process at a time

so you can see what's happening to the system and which process is suffering and/or causing the delays. both the victim and the villain, no cap. 😭

now, the fun part — you can walk the processes by using the cursor keys 🧚 and if you press s followed by a letter, then only the active processes starting with that letter get displayed and walked. just that letter, that's the whole filter. and if you press s followed by 0, that filter gets reset. boom, back to everything. 🌈

ngl the vibes here are very "developer staring intensely at a terminal at 2am" and honestly? valid.

---

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

• powertop(1)

and if you want the full story, not just this cute lil summary — the program is more fully described at http://www.latencytop.org 🌐

---

✨ AUTHOR ✨

latencytop was written by Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com> 🫶

This manual page was written by Giacomo Catenazzi <cate@debian.org>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others). 💜

---

and that's the whole page, bestie ✨ this one's from the System Manager's Manual, dated November 9, 2008 — yeah she's a lil vintage but she still slays 💅🎀 go find your latency, queen 👑💖