>This morning I got pgtop working but had some questions which I forwarded to the author Cosimo Streppone. In his very polite reply he pointed out I should really be using pg_top (note the hyphen) so I then set to getting that to work on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Download the latest release from the site above (I downloaded pg_top-3.6.2.tar.gz) and then

tar -zxpvf pg_top-3.6.2.tar.gz 
cd pg_top-3.6.2
./configure 
make

It’s very possible you might get some errors during this. The three I had were

configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH

You don’t have the basic build tools installed. Do.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Also during config

configure: error: pg_config not found

Get the postgres dev libs – do

sudo apt-get install libpq-dev

During make I got a heap of errors – starting with

gcc  -Wall -g -L/usr/lib -lpq  -o pg_top color.o commands.o display.o getopt.o screen.o sprompt.o pg.o pg_top.o username.o utils.o version.o m_linux.o -ldl -lm 
display.o: In function `display_move':
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:257: undefined reference to `tgoto'
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:257: undefined reference to `tputs'
display.o: In function `display_write':
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:387: undefined reference to `tgoto'
/home/icottee/pg_top-3.6.2/display.c:387: undefined reference to `tputs'

The solution I found was to

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev

Then rerun config AGAIN and do a make.

Now I could

pg_top --help

And all was good. Read the web page for info about what you can do with it. But in short you can see all running postgres processes, see what they are doing, examine their query plan, what locks they have and examine table and index statistics of the relevant tables. Full info and screenshots can be found here.