Htop Explained
The problem with htop on Linux is that once there are 200+ processes running on the system htop takes significant portion of CPU time and utilization. This is because htop has to go through each process entry in procfs (open, read, close) every second and parse the text context instead of just calling appropriate syscall like on the OpenBSD and friends to retrieve such information.It would help if kernel provided process information in binary form instead of serializing it into text. Or even better to provide specific syscalls for it like on macOS, Windows, OpenBSD, Solaris and others.