Topnet: A network-aware top(1)

System administrators regularly use the top utility for understanding the resource consumption of the processes running on UNIX computers. Top provides an accurate and real-time display of the computing and memory capacity of the system among the running processes, but it provides no information about the network traffic sent and received by the processes running on the system. Although we've seen a proliferation of network monitoring tools that help system administrators understand the traffic flowing through their networks, most of these tools have been designed for network deployment and can not easily, if at all, provide real-time attribution of network resources to individual processes running on end hosts. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of Topnet, an extension of the top UNIX utility that provides a process-centric approach to traffic monitoring. Topnet presents users with an intuitive real-time attribution of network resources to individual processes. Our evaluation suggests that Topnet through (i) the familiar user interface of top and (ii) a reasonable performance overhead, provides an accurate way to attribute network traffic to individual processes, enabling users to have a more comprehensive process-aware understanding of network resource consumption in their systems.