I found the colorized htop program to be a much improved and configurable alternative to the old monochrome top program.
The "tree" view can give you a good idea hierarchy of process and thread spawning (e.g. login session) in your specific distro install.
You can easily configure it to include kernel threads as well as sort by various items such as priority, memory usage and CPU usage via function keys found at the bottom of the app.
You can vertically scroll through the list or search for specific keywords.
I have used it to find running packages (consuming CPU and memory) that I am not using and then uninstall them, check different desktops and display managers as well as see what JRMC26 is doing when using various audio and video playback and streaming features.
