The K Desktop Environment

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3. Using the KDE Task Manager

After you have started the Task Manager you will see a dialog box with three pages. You can change to other pages by clicking on the handle of the pages. The start-up page can be configured in the options dialog available from the menu.

3.1 The Process List Page

The Process List Page gives you a list of processes on your system. The list can be sorted by each column. Just press the left mouse button over the head of the column.

The list shows the following information about each process. Please note that not all properties are available on every operating system.

Underneath the table you find four buttons which will be described now from left to right.

The Refresh Rate

The refresh rate determines how often the process list will be updated. This is particularly important for the calculation of the processor load of each process. The load is averaged over the whole time between updates. A slow, a medium and a fast update rate is available. For most purposes the medium rate is a good compromise.

The Process Filter

The Process Filter can be used to reduce the number of processes displayed in the table. You can filter out processes you are not interested in. Currently you can display all processes, system processes only, user processes only or your processes only.

The Refresh Button

This button can be used to force an immediate update of the process list.

The Kill Button

If you want to terminate a process you can send a kill signal to the selected process by pressing this button.

3.2 The Process Tree Page

The Process Tree Page has been designed to show the relationships between the running processes. A process that is started by another process is called the child of that process. A tree is an elegant way to show this parent-child relationship. The init process is the ancester of all processes.

If you are not interested in the children of a particular process you can click on the little box to the left of the parent and the subtree will collapse. Another click on that box will unfold the subtree again.

This page features four buttons to modifiy the tree. The buttons are described from left to right.

The Sort Button

This button determines the sorting order of the children in the tree.

The Refresh Now Button

The Refresh Now Button must be used to update the tree with the current processes.

The Change Root Button

If you are only interested in a certain subtree you can selected the parent of the subtree and push this button to make the selected process the new root of the tree. Pressing this button when no process is selected will restore the initial setting.

The Kill Button

If you want to terminate a process you can send a kill signal to the selected process by pressing this button.

3.3 The Performance Meter Page

The Performance Meter Page provides two meters that show the overall processor load and the total memory used by the system. The red line in the memory history is the separation between physical memory (RAM) and swap space memory. Most Unixes try to minimize the accesses to the hard disk by caching files in memory. Therefore it is normal to always have almost the whole physical memory in use. This is not necessarily a sign of excessive memory use by certain programs but a sign of good caching strategies. Due to the very misleading nature of this meter I am planning to change it in one of the next versions to be more meaningful.

3.4 Pop-up Menus

Clicking with the right mouse button on a process in the process list or process tree will pop-up a little menu that allows you to send certain signals to this process or change it's scheduling priority. The latter is not available on all operating systems. Changing the priority will affect the amount of CPU time the process will receive to do it's job. As a normal user you can usually only increase the value which will decrease the priority. The higher the value the less likely the process will get CPU time. This can be used on systems that are shared by many people. Longer running jobs (batch jobs) should be "reniced" to preserve a short response time for interactive processes.

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