Better to kill one bad process than let the whole system crash. Catch the hogs and let your uptimes grow!
Viewing Processes
$ top
Processor, Memory, Quit
$ ps waux
$ ps waux|grep -i firefox
$ pstree
$ pstree -phU|less –raw
Killing Processes
$ kill 2391
$ kill -9 2309
$ killall fire[tab]
$ killall -9 firefox-bin
Don’t killall with sudo, or at least think first. Could kill processes from all users.
Related Commands
Core commands, like ps and kill, have survived the test of time. You can expect to see them in any Linux.
Here are some commands that are newer, but interesting nevertheless.
$ xkill
$ htop
$ powertop
$ free -m
Don’t blindly accept every tweaking suggestion from powertop, your you risk breaking your OS install.