Textbook of Linux

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NetHogs

A bandwidth monitor that groups by process.

NetHogs reports network bandwidth usage per process rather than per connection or per interface, which makes it easy to find the application that is hogging bandwidth on a machine. The display is a simple curses-style table that updates several times a second, sorted by current send and receive throughput.

Roman Yepishev started NetHogs around 2004; it has since had a small but steady stream of contributors and is packaged in every major Linux distribution. The implementation reads /proc to map sockets to processes and uses libpcap to capture packet sizes without doing full content inspection.

NetHogs is one of those small utilities that most experienced Linux administrators reach for on a hunch — when something is saturating an outbound link, NetHogs in a terminal almost immediately answers the "which process?" question that iftop and tcpdump leave you to figure out separately.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install nethogs
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install nethogs
Arch:          sudo pacman -S nethogs