[SunHELP] top

[Dale Ghent]

On Mon, 25 Dec 2000, Bashar wrote:

| Regards,
| 	Can anyone explain each % and what does exactly mean and when/what
| to worry about with servers hosting huge apps ?
| 
| Example:
| CPU states: 78.7% idle,  3.3% user,  6.9% kernel, 11.1% iowait,  0.0% swap

I can explain what each category means (idle, user, etc) but your question
about what to worry about in regards to running "huge apps" is too general
and vague. I'll let you figure that out based on what I describe here.

idle percentage is just that; the prtcentage of time the *system* was idle
during the sample period (the default is 5 seconds in top).

The user category is how much of the time the system spent running
processes that made user-land library calls.

The kerel category measures the percentage of time the system spent
processing system (kernel) calls (read(), write(), open() etc).

iowait measures the percentage of time the system spent waiting for IO
operations to complete (from the disk and network).

/dale