tiptop

Top-like display backed by hardware performance counters

TLDR

Launch the interactive monitor

$ tiptop

Refresh every 2 seconds

$ tiptop -d [2]

Show only the named process

$ tiptop -p [firefox]

Show only one user's tasks

$ tiptop -u [$USER]

Run in batch mode for 5 iterations (e.g., for logging)

$ tiptop -b -n [5]

Include kernel activity in counter values (needs root / CAP_SYS_ADMIN)

$ sudo tiptop -K

tiptop displays a top-like view of running tasks but, instead of CPU% and RSS, the columns come from hardware performance counters (instructions per cycle, cache misses, branch mispredictions, etc.) read through the Linux perf_event interface. This makes it suitable for spotting microarchitectural bottlenecks — bad cache behavior, branch-prediction issues, FPU pressure — that a standard top cannot see.The set of counters and how they are combined into columns is configured per-architecture; users can also define custom columns in ~/.tiptoprc to expose additional counters or derived metrics.

PARAMETERS

-b

Batch mode: print to stdout, no interactive control.

-c

Display the full command line instead of the process name.

-d SECONDS

Delay between refreshes (fractional values allowed).

-H

Show one line per thread instead of per process.

-i

Include idle tasks.

-K

Count kernel-mode events (needs perf_event_paranoid <= 1 or root).

-n COUNT

Exit after COUNT refreshes (useful with -b).

-p PIDorNAME

Restrict the display to a process by PID or basename.

-u USER

Restrict the display to a user.

-w PID

Highlight/follow a single task.

-S COL

Sort by the named column.

--sticky

Keep finished tasks in the table.

--epoch

Print Unix epoch timestamps in batch output.

INSTALL

sudo apt install tiptop

sudo dnf install tiptop

sudo zypper install tiptop

nix profile install nixpkgs#tiptop

CAVEATS

Requires hardware performance-counter support and an accessible perf_event subsystem; on hardened kernels you may need to lower /proc/sys/kernel/perf_event_paranoid. -K (count kernel events) requires elevated privileges. Some virtual machines do not expose PMU counters, in which case columns will read as zero.

HISTORY

tiptop was written by Erven Rohou at INRIA to make hardware performance counters as accessible as top. A separate, unrelated Python tool of the same name exists; this page documents the canonical Erven Rohou implementation packaged as tiptop in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch.