The following information shows that there are in total 4 Processors on this machine:
Does the command top reveal this information clearly?
Besides, the load average is:
1.12, 1.26, 1.32
over 1 which means over 100% CPU utilization. But what I understand is if there are 4 processors then the value of 1 would mean only 25% CPU utilization in total. Is this correct?
Next, the top command shows that the following java process is utilizing 142.9% of the CPU resource:
Is this value relative to the total capacity of the CPU (with all its 4 processors)?
Can you please help me make it clear to myself what those things (4 processors, load average, 142.9 %CPU for Java) are showing exactly? How do they relate to each other?
"Load average" in top is actually the run queue average length.
Over 1 means on average things are waiting on the cpu, below 1 means on average no-one has to wait. Don't confuse this with %cpu - it's not like that.
The bold summary line show percentages should always be across all the cores, but can get confused if you have the wrong version of top, so always add them up to check you get 100 the first time you use top on a new machine to check this.
As for process %cpu, that depends on your version of top - if it's compiled for your arcihtecture properly, it understands and the % is how much of one CPU is beign used (so more than 100% would require multithreading across multiple cores).
To complicate matters further, a system running at 100% cpu might not be terrible if your shceduler is beign smart - it could well be that you've got a bunch of low priority things in the background that get a bunch of work done while the system is idel, then throtle back when you need it - ie sitting at 100% you might still find that your CPU hungry command you want to run goes just fine and the cpu load happily stays at 100% during and after. It's often a waste of time to monitor CPU percentages overall.
Better is to look at:
* overall wait % ("wa") - you don't want that to get very high or it indicates something is thrashing in swap or disk.
* run queue length
In your java example:
Its saying that you have a Priority 23 task, (lower numbers get priority on CPU time) using 70.6% of your free memory and 142.9% of one CPU (ie it's multithreaded and is using about 1.5 Cores).
Last edited by Smiling Dragon; 08-08-2013 at 11:34 PM..
Reason: added the java example breakdown.
This User Gave Thanks to Smiling Dragon For This Post:
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