whats more accurate - top or ps aux

[drazah]

as it says in the title, which will give me the most accurate cpu reading
2 cores
AMD 4200+ X2

i have looked at them both and they always seem the be different.

[Muppet]

For realtime monitoring, i'd have to say 'top'. PS Aux is a 'snap shot' and not updated.

Otherwise, i tend to be a fan of ps and its aux option.

[d4f]

as already said ps is a snapshot while top provides snapshots done on a regularly base and is
thus much better for monitoring a service, while ps can easily be combined with grep, cut and so on.

For monitoring I would recommend using the "htop" command (Debian: apt-get install htop),
which also got a pstree-like view and is more interactive -but it uses the same source as top so no difference in
the output _should_ be expected (except for used ram, it's much more accurante on that one)