Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 18 Aug 2006 18:31:15 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        Bill LeFebvre <bill@lefebvre.org>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: TOP shows above 100% WCPU usage
Message-ID:  <20060818083115.GB732@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <44E483C0.6050209@lefebvre.org>
References:  <44E1F796.5070105@rogers.com> <20060815172728.GB88051@dan.emsphone.com> <44E204C0.60806@rogers.com> <44E3FE61.6060800@lefebvre.org> <20060817144110.GB88424@dan.emsphone.com> <44E483C0.6050209@lefebvre.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help

--aM3YZ0Iwxop3KEKx
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

On Thu, 2006-Aug-17 10:57:04 -0400, Bill LeFebvre wrote:
>Dan Nelson wrote:
>>I just built top-3.6 on such a system, though, and it does report a
>>simple "main(){for(;;);}" process as consuming 100 %CPU.  Maybe you're
>>thinking of Solaris's own prstat command?
>
>Heh.  I released 3.6 with new SunOS code that didn't adjust for number of=
=20
>cpus, and someone flagged the behavior as a bug.   So you're right: 3.6=20
>doesn't do it this way.  But 3.5 did, and it seems at least some people=20
>prefer it that way.

I actually prefer this new behaviour.  One of my major uses of top is
identifying processes that are spinning for one reason or another.
Having a process show up as 99-100% is quite obvious and I can then
look closer to see if that process is validly using 100% CPU or not.
Having a process using 3.1% CPU (on a 32-CPU system) would be far less
obvious.  (In my case, I'm scanning instaneous top outputs from ~60
hosts so I don't want to have to study each output too closely).

To my way of thinking, %CPU is a percentage of a single CPU.  If a
box has 32 CPUs, then maximum load is 3200% of a single CPU.

I think there are probably equally good rationales for each approach.
Probably the best situation is a flag to toggle between the two
approaches, together with two different titles to make it clear which
is being used.

--=20
Peter Jeremy

--aM3YZ0Iwxop3KEKx
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (FreeBSD)

iD8DBQFE5XrT/opHv/APuIcRAnOZAJwIEpTRBTzgVyCv6ttpSqeAKgwNmACfTF8G
ah96BnUIT9P5pooQboUFRAY=
=Sz9I
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--aM3YZ0Iwxop3KEKx--



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20060818083115.GB732>