ptop: Our CTO Rewrote vtop in Rust and Cut Memory 93%

Our CTO, Pate Bryant, built ptop in a day: a terminal system monitor written in Rust that keeps the look and feel of the classic Node.js tool vtop while using far fewer resources. It is a personal open-source project, and a good example of how we approach performance work for clients.

What ptop Is

ptop is a Rust rewrite of vtop. It keeps what people liked about the original: dotted CPU and memory graphs, process grouping and sorting, keyboard and mouse navigation, and 12 themes. The goal was to change the engine and leave the experience alone.

Basic controls are what you would expect: j and k move through processes, c sorts by CPU, m sorts by memory, and q quits. Try a theme with ptop -t nord.

The Numbers

In Pate's test on an Apple M2 Max, comparing ptop 0.1.0 against vtop 0.6.1, ptop used about 93% less memory (RSS) and about 15% less CPU. The report covers three alternating 20-second pairs run with ptop in its --vtop-parity mode, so it is a local comparison, not a universal guarantee. Results depend on the workload, and these are the published 0.1.0 figures. The full method and raw data are in the benchmark report, so anyone can check the claim rather than take our word for it.

Why Rewrite a Working Tool

A monitor that sits open all day should not be one of the heavier things on the machine. A JavaScript runtime carries a baseline cost that no amount of tuning removes. Moving to Rust removes it, and that is where most of the memory saving comes from.

The same logic applies to business software. When a service is slow or expensive to run, the fix is often not a clever patch but a better foundation for the one hot path that matters. Measure first, pick the part worth replacing, and keep the user-facing behavior identical so nothing else has to change.

Honest Differences From vtop

• Branding - ptop shows its own name and has no footer link.
• Updates - ptop updates manually.
• Parity mode - the --vtop-parity flag restores vtop's branding and updater behavior for reference testing.
• Memory fix - an optional --fix flag corrects vtop's macOS memory arithmetic.

ptop is MIT licensed, with credit to vtop and its dependencies.

Install It

On Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later, install the prebuilt package from npm:

npm install -g @patebryant/ptop
ptop

On Linux, build from source with Rust 1.92.0 or later:

cargo install --git https://github.com/patebry/ptop --locked
ptop

The source is on GitHub, and issues are welcome at the issue tracker. Pate's full write-up, ptop: a Rust rewrite of vtop, covers the build in more detail.

If you have software that is slower or more expensive than it should be, talk to our team about where a targeted rewrite would pay off.