Linux “top”: how to tell which process is what? [closed]

Question

I have several cron jobs (calling my PHP scripts via curl) in the background that are running. I'm trying to monitor their performance. Using top, I see a bunch of httpd commands -- but I have a feeling these do not represent the cron jobs (e.g. too many httpd exit for the cron tasks being called).

How can I know what the httpd processes are for sure? Are there any other tools I should be looking at to monitor my system?

Answer 1

What you want is to look in /proc/[pid]/status.

Answer 2

You can get a hierarchically overview about your running processes with ps efaux or pstree -A -p
Maybe that helps.