A simple one liner I used to take a stroll on a few systems, and see where I had a runaway backend process. This uses ps's command extended options (-o); I almost never use those, so I thought it was better to make a note to myself 🙂
That sort command could be crafted better, but it did its job in this case.

$ for SERVER in x{1..6} ; do echo $SERVER ; ssh -n $SERVER 'ps -C backend -o bsdtime,pid,comm | grep -v TIME | sort -rn | head -n 3' ; done 

I'd like to investigate how to manage such a situation automatically using CFEngine. Will try that sooner or later 😉