question about top

[Nathaniel Hall]

iowait is the amount of time processes wait on the hard drives to read 
or write.  If you are messing with a large file and also writing at the 
same time, the iowait will be higher because there is more hard drive 
involvement.  Obviously, the less iowait, the less wasted processor cycles.

Nathaniel Hall
Intrusion Detection and Firewall Technician
Ozarks Technical Community College -- Office of Computer Networking

halln at otc.edu
417-799-0552



Zambrano Teran, David wrote:

>Hello everyone.
>
> 
>
>This is more a question than a problem; in my server it's usual to see
>this when run the top command
>
> 
>
>CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  iowait    idle
>
>           total    7.6%    0.0%    7.2%   0.0%     0.0%  224.4%  159.6%
>
>           cpu00    1.5%    0.0%    0.1%   0.0%     0.0%   19.4%   78.8%
>
>           cpu01    1.5%    0.0%    2.1%   0.0%     0.1%   94.7%    1.3%
>
>           cpu02    1.3%    0.0%    0.7%   0.0%     0.0%   19.9%   77.8%
>
>           cpu03    3.1%    0.0%    4.3%   0.0%     0.1%   90.7%    1.5%
>
> 
>
>As you can see, about the half of the processing capacity is on IOWAIT,
>being a recently windows to linux converted, I don't know what this
>means, could anybody explain me?
>
> 
>
>Advance server 3.0 update 3 with 1 GB RAM and 2 Pentium Xeon 3 ghz, Raid
>5.
>
> 
>
>Thanks in advance, 
>
>David
>
>  
>