> Turns out that at least one major cause of my slow-down problem was
> apparently 
> that a program called 'kat' was running in the background.

kat is evil, its good that you killed it ;)

> Even after "killing" 'kat,' 'top' was still showing very high percentages 
> under %CPU time -- in the very high 90% range. 

Which process or processes were using up the cpu time? In the listing you
show below, it appears the cpu is 98% idle.


> Another mystery is that when I do: 'who' I see these results: 
> $ who
> joe      :0           Jul  1 17:20
> joe      pts/0        Jul  1 17:20
> joe      pts/1        Jul  2 14:15
> joe      pts/3        Jul  2 14:16

I'm assuming you had multiple terminal windows open. Each top-level shell
will show up as a user, I think.

> Also, 'top' shows 3 users and it lists a whole bunch of processes running, 
> most of which I do not recognize.  What are all these processes and how can
> one determine which others (if any, like 'kat') might well be eliminated?

There are typically a large number of processes, and I don't know an easy
answer to finding out what all of them are, you would just have to dig
around. Check out the --forest option to ps, it gives you a little more
information about which processes are descendants of which.

> 
> Finally (for now), what is the difference between running 'top' and and
> what 
> happens when it is running and one presses capital M, the results of which 
> are different (shown further below), but I don't understand what that 
> difference is.

With a quick check, I didn't see M listed in the man page, but it appears
that it causes the processes to be sorted by descending resident memory size.
When first started, top will show the processes with the highest cpu usage
first.



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