Image from http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/You've probably used top to monitor running processes on a server. It's tremendously handy when you're wondering where all that RAM went.
For web applications, the bottlenecks we deal with are more typically bandwidth and database issues. To keep an eye on a MySQL database, install mytop, a command-line tool that looks like top, but monitors database threads instead of system processes.
After it's installed, you can run it from the command line, specifying which database you want it to look at, or keep those parameters in a .mytop file. The display shows queries per second, activity in the key buffer, and the status of active threads.
You can kill particular threads, filter by hostname or database, and more.
Innotop is another tool with a similar purpose, possibly more powerful, but mytop is what I'm familiar with.
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