Question

top - CPU States

Asked by: phasevar

Can someone point me to a document that goes into detail on the cpu states for the top command?

I'm looking at this:

Cpu(s):  9.3% us,  4.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 80.1% id,  5.3% wa,  1.3% hi,  0.0% si

I'm looking for a definition of each individual state.

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Asked On
2007-02-04 at 12:42:33ID22148981
Tags

top

,

cpu

,

wa

Topic

Linux Administration

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
7

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Answers

 

by: TintinPosted on 2007-02-04 at 13:10:35ID: 18464355

Do you need a more detailed explanation than the one in the top man page?

 

by: phasevarPosted on 2007-02-04 at 13:31:09ID: 18464436

I don't know what man page you're looking at but if it has that info it must be different than the one that came with Fedora Core release 6.

In the man page I'm looking at there's a "DESCRIPTIONS of Fields" section and it goes straight into column info for each process and totally skips all the global information.

Doing a search for us, sy, ni, id, wa, hi and si turn up nothing but partial word matches.

So I don't see where these fields are described at all, less in any amount of detail.

 

by: TintinPosted on 2007-02-04 at 13:42:47ID: 18464485

On Redhat, the top man page has:

       CPU states
            Shows  the percentage of CPU time in user mode, system mode, niced
            tasks, iowait and idle.  (Niced tasks are only  those  whose  nice
            value  is  positive.)   Time  spent  in  niced  tasks will also be
            counted in system and user time, so the total will  be  more  than
            100%.   The  processes  and states display may be toggled by the t
            interactive command.


I'd be surprised if the Fedora man page is any different.

 

by: phasevarPosted on 2007-02-04 at 14:01:56ID: 18464567

It's different.  There is no CPU states information.  I just did a search for "states" and the info you have is not there.

I've been a sysadmin for many years now and I know what the us (user), sy (system), ni (niced), and id (idle) states are but I have no idea what the wa, hi and si states are.  Those were not in earlier versions of top.

I'm looking for detailed documentation on what those states are and what they mean to the system.

 

by: quinksPosted on 2007-02-04 at 19:44:18ID: 18465626

us: userspace - what you're running above the kernel
sy: system calls - what is running inside the kernel
ni: reniced processes
id: idle
wa: waiting for i/o
hi: hardware interrupts - how much time is spent dealing with hardware
si: software interrupts - how much time is spent dealing with software-created interrupts (system calls, etc.)

 

by: phasevarPosted on 2007-02-04 at 19:55:28ID: 18465651

Thank you

 

by: sobhitPosted on 2008-08-29 at 06:09:01ID: 22344954

There's a new metric out.. and it's called %st

Cpu(s): 13.9%us, 19.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 66.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st

You will find this in new versions of top, on virtualise systems.

visit http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/linux390/perf/tuning_rec_CPUtimes_virtual.html for more details on this metric.

Hope this helps somebody else,

Dallas

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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