What's the deal with 'top' ?
Cowles, Steve
steve at stevecowles.com
Sun Oct 26 23:42:09 UTC 2003
I'm running a fully patched Fedora system on a single P4/1.7G with 256MB of
RAM.
I was using the command "top" to view processes and noticed that it showed
my CPU was 0.0% idle when I started X (gnome). But yet no process(s) were
consuming 100% of the CPU (see below). Lot of RAM though, especially the X
process. The odd part is if I stop X (logout), top shows 99.0% free.
Also, if I use the X based 'system monitor' command, it seems to correctly
display the CPU utilization. Which is like 2% utilization when idle.
Is anyone else seeing this behavior? Seems unique to the nptl based kernels
only. I don't see this on my RH-9 system.
Steve Cowles
----------------------------------------------------
# grep "Linux version" /var/log/messages
Oct 26 06:51:00 enterprise kernel: Linux version 2.4.22-1.2108.nptl
# grep CPU: /var/log/messages
Oct 26 06:51:03 enterprise kernel: CPU: Trace cache: 12K uops, L1 D cache:
8K
Oct 26 06:51:03 enterprise kernel: CPU: L2 cache: 256K
Oct 26 06:51:03 enterprise kernel: CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1.70GHz
stepping 03
# cat top.x (with X running)
16:59:46 up 5 min, 5 users, load average: 0.67, 0.46, 0.20
71 processes: 69 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle
total 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 33.6% 34.0% 32.3% 0.0%
Mem: 255500k av, 197528k used, 57972k free, 0k shrd, 11056k
buff
48968k active, 127676k inactive
Swap: 265064k av, 0k used, 265064k free 89456k
cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
1099 root 15 0 275M 19M 7232 S 0.0 7.7 0:01 0 X
1251 scowles 16 0 21076 20M 1980 S 0.0 8.2 0:00 0 gconfd-2
1288 scowles 16 0 16804 16M 9924 S 0.0 6.5 0:01 0 nautilus
1299 scowles 16 0 10536 10M 8108 S 0.0 4.1 0:00 0
gnome-panel
1308 scowles 15 0 13264 12M 7772 S 0.0 5.1 0:00 0
gnome-termina
1324 scowles 25 10 13500 13M 8884 S N 0.0 5.2 0:00 0
rhn-applet-gu
# cat top.no_x (no X running)
16:57:11 up 2 min, 1 user, load average: 0.49, 0.34, 0.13
47 processes: 46 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle
total 0.0% 0.0% 0.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 99.0%
Mem: 255500k av, 97752k used, 157748k free, 0k shrd, 7232k
buff
30768k active, 52148k inactive
Swap: 265064k av, 0k used, 265064k free 56164k
cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME CPU COMMAND
1182 scowles 16 0 1048 1048 888 R 0.9 0.4 0:00 0 top
1 root 16 0 424 424 364 S 0.0 0.1 0:04 0 init
2 root 15 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 0 keventd
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