Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Mon, 7 Jul 2003 15:54:59 +0200
From:      Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>
To:        current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: /dev/shm
Message-ID:  <20030707135459.GH10021@merlin.emma.line.org>
In-Reply-To: <3F097719.8030301@gmx.net>
References:  <3F08B199.3050409@comcast.net> <3F08B79B.2040805@gmx.net> <20030707001443.GA1530@invisible-island.net> <20030707002347.GC5141@aurema.com> <20030706203440.D89894@vhost101.his.com> <3F08C4FD.8010107@gmx.net> <m3el12lf91.fsf@merlin.emma.line.org> <3F09663D.9020200@gmx.net> <20030707123707.GA18750@saltmine.radix.net> <3F097719.8030301@gmx.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, 07 Jul 2003, Marcin Dalecki wrote:

> The point is that this is one of the reasons why the top command in
> question takes a lot of relative CPU time under Linux. Some
> "faster" versions of procps utils try to cache data but the trade off
> is simply the fact that the results are not 100% accurate.

Top data is not accurate (I though that was obvious ;-).

It's an obsolete snapshot the very moment it's printed to your console,
and I bet it changes as you read with a lot of implementations because
no-one wants to beat the big kernel lock on the process list just
because some user happens to run top, might be a nice DoS otherwise,
fork-bombing top...

If you want accurate data, use a kernel debugger with remote interface
and make sure the machine does nothing except servicing the debugger
interface.

> I tought this was obvious?

Why do I care? 0.58user 0.89system 1:00.91elapsed 2%CPU -- on a 266 MHz
Pentium-II, Linux 2.4, 5 years old, with 190 processes. The box idles
73% of the time it's up, there's _ample_ CPU power left.

-- 
Matthias Andree



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20030707135459.GH10021>