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stdPikachu Apprentice
Joined: 10 Mar 2004 Posts: 254 Location: UK
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Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 9:36 am Post subject: What do all those weird fields in top mean...? |
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OK, so I have my ass-kicking new workstation running gentoo. As such, I have become another slave to the "what is my system doing and how can I make it do it faster" brigade, which usually boils down to hours of watching top do its thing.
But I'm a bit confused by some of the fields - most notably the CPU states.
us = user, i.e. CPU time used by userspace applications
sy = system, i.e. CPU time used by kernelspace applications (device drivers and such)
ni = nice, i.e. CPU time used by "niced" applications
id = idle time
What do wa, hi and si mean? I've noticed that whenever I run anything from a terminal, "wa" fills up all of my idle time - right now I have a big copy going on. cp is using about 10% of the CPU, 20% is being used by the system and 70% is being used up by "wa", with some occasionally being gobbled by "hi". Does anyone have a clue on what these mean? They're not mentioned in the top manual as far as I can tell, and googling for terms like "top linux wa" is obviously next to useless...! |
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ebrostig Bodhisattva
Joined: 20 Jul 2002 Posts: 3152 Location: Orlando, Fl
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Posted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 12:55 pm Post subject: |
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Are they not described in the man-pages for top?
Oh, you do know that the displayed values in top are snapshots and not really all that useful?
Try running top as follows:
top -d .05 (or even better -d .01)
Now you will have an almost realtime update of the disply.
Edit: Ok, you need to look at the man pages for vmstat since it is part of the total CPU information.
wa: Time spent waiting for IO. Prior to Linux 2.5.41, shown as zero.
si: Amount of memory swapped in from disk (/s).
hi is not described anywhere...
Erik _________________ 'Yes, Firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.' |
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pavera Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 27 May 2002 Posts: 84
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Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 2:44 am Post subject: |
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OK, si is data swapped in from disk?
Why does my system show 15-25% si usage, and vmstat shows 0 for si, also top shows 0kb of swap used...
My system is not swapping, how come top shows a ton of si usage?
Also I reiterate the parents question, what does hi mean? Its not documented anywhere? I'm using 5% of my cpu on hi, and want to know why. |
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