When running Nginx on Windows, developers often miss Linux's powerful htop command that provides detailed process information. While Windows doesn't have an exact htop equivalent, several tools can give you similar visibility into Nginx worker processes.

The Windows Task Manager offers basic process information:

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open Task Manager
2. Go to the "Details" tab
3. Look for nginx.exe processes
4. Right-click and select "Properties" for more details

For more technical details, PowerShell provides excellent alternatives:

# Get detailed Nginx process information
Get-Process nginx | Select-Object Id, ProcessName, CPU, WorkingSet, StartTime | Format-Table -AutoSize

# Continuous monitoring (like htop)
while($true) { Get-Process nginx; Start-Sleep -Seconds 2 }

For those needing more advanced features:

• Process Explorer (Microsoft Sysinternals) - Shows process tree and handles
• Process Hacker - Open-source alternative with more features
• Windows Performance Monitor - For in-depth performance metrics

To specifically monitor Nginx worker processes:

# Using PowerShell to count worker processes
(Get-Process nginx).Count

# Getting memory usage per worker
Get-Process nginx | Measure-Object WorkingSet -Average -Maximum -Minimum

Here's a basic script to monitor Nginx workers continuously:

while($true) {
    Clear-Host
    $processes = Get-Process nginx -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    if ($processes) {
        $processes | Format-Table Id, ProcessName, CPU, WorkingSet, StartTime -AutoSize
        Write-Host "Total Workers: $($processes.Count)"
        Write-Host "Total Memory: $(($processes.WorkingSet | Measure-Object -Sum).Sum / 1MB) MB"
    } else {
        Write-Host "No Nginx processes found"
    }
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 1
}

For the most accurate monitoring, enable Nginx's status module:

location /nginx_status {
    stub_status on;
    access_log off;
    allow 127.0.0.1;
    deny all;
}

Then query it with:

Invoke-WebRequest http://localhost/nginx_status

When working with Nginx on Windows, many Linux developers miss the powerful process monitoring capabilities of htop. Unlike Linux's process hierarchy display, Windows requires different tools to achieve similar visibility into worker processes.

These built-in tools can help monitor Nginx processes:

# Task Manager (GUI)
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc
2. Go to "Details" tab
3. Look for nginx.exe processes

# Command Line Tools
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq nginx.exe"

For more detailed information similar to htop, use PowerShell:

# Get detailed Nginx process info
Get-Process nginx | Select-Object Id, ProcessName, CPU, WorkingSet, StartTime | Format-Table -AutoSize

# Continuous monitoring (like top)
while($true) { 
    Get-Process nginx | Select-Object Id, ProcessName, CPU, WorkingSet | Format-Table -AutoSize
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 2
    Clear-Host
}

For htop-like experience on Windows:

• Process Explorer (Sysinternals)
• Process Hacker
• Windows Task Manager (Enhanced in Win11)

To focus specifically on Nginx worker processes:

# PowerShell one-liner
Get-Process nginx | Where-Object { $_.ProcessName -eq "nginx" -and $_.Id -ne (Get-Process nginx | Select-Object -First 1).Id }

Create a monitoring script that checks worker count:

$masterPID = (Get-Process nginx | Select-Object -First 1).Id
$workers = (Get-Process nginx).Count - 1
Write-Host "Nginx running with $workers worker processes (Master PID: $masterPID)"

Windows Performance Monitor can track Nginx metrics:

# List available counters
Get-Counter -ListSet * | Where-Object { $_.CounterSetName -like "*nginx*" }

# Sample specific counter
Get-Counter '\Process(nginx)\% Processor Time' -Continuous