holo-build VS htop

If I may toot my own horn: The thing that grinds my gears the most about software project websites is when they don't clearly say what the thing does, and who this is for. That's why the website for my configuration management tool (https://holocm.org) has two sections, "This is for you if..." and even more importantly "This is NOT for you if..."

wrote my own system package compiler.

Probably everyone knows about the "top" command. Htop is similar, but gives us a more user-friendly output. It shows processes using the most resources, how much available resources you have and who runs those processes. For more information, visit https://htop.dev/

determine which processes consume specific resources (in your particular case even a "5 minutes session of staring at htop" would do the trick.) (Alternatives: ps -ef, ps aux, top, glances ... )

When you see the laptop throttling, is htop or another monitoring program showing that the RAM is full, or is it only partly used?

I like htop to check system resources

try htop. It's already on Ubuntu, not sure about other flavors.

Program it in yourself: https://github.com/htop-dev/htop

htop is a colour-coded command-line system monitor, process viewer, and process manager. It shows a list of processes running on your computer ordered by CPU usage