system top

Use this command to show a list of the most demanding processes. The list's columns (from left to right side) are:

• Process name (such as admin.fe)

• Process ID (pid, such as 2255)

• Activity statuses, which could include:

  • R — Running

  • S — Sleeping

  • Z — Zombie (could indicate that the process is hung or crashed; to kill and optionally restart the process, use diagnose debug tools process signal <signal_int>)

  • D — Disk sleep (could indicate that disk IO cannot read/write)

  • T — Stopped

  • < — Higher priority compared to other processes (is not nice).

  • N — Lower priority compared to the other processes (is nice)

• CPU usage in time per core and as a percentage

• Memory usage in megabytes (MB) and as a percentage

While the command is running, you can also press the following keys to change the list sort order:

• M — Memory usage

• P — CPU usage

• N — Process ID number

• T — Time spent running

The list continues to periodically refresh at the interval in delay <refresh-seconds_int>, or until you press q (quit) or Ctrl + C.

Syntax

diagnose system top [delay <refresh-seconds_int> [lines <count_int>]] [| grep <search_str>]

Variable	Description	Default
lines <count_int>	Enter the number of how many top processes to show.	36
delay <refresh-seconds_int>	Enter the interval in seconds between each refresh of the list.	4
grep <search_str>	Enter some text to search and filter output. For example, you could enter smtpd to show only lines with that process name.

Example

FortiMail # diagnose system top delay 3 lines 5

System Time:  2025-06-02 09:02:04 EDT (Uptime: 2d 16h 0m)
CPU:   0.0% usr  0.0% sys  0.0% nice 99.9% idle  0.0% io  0.0% irq  0.0% sirq
Mem: 3943M total, 1450M free, 76M buff, 2180M cached
     COMMAND        PID  STAT  CPU %CPU     RSS %MEM 
       dbmanager   1802  S      2   0.0    107m  2.7
     mailfilterd   1962  S      2   0.0    103m  2.6
        admin.fe   2255  S      0   0.0   94064  2.3
         cmdbsvr   1803  S <    1   0.0   83236  2.0
      expiremail   1932  S N    2   0.0   75388  1.8
 

Related topics

system load

system matrix

system mpstat

debug