Top lists three load averages. The first (0.14
Top lists three load averages. The first (0.14 in our example) is the load average over the last minute, the second (0.08) is for the last 5 minutes, while the last (0.07) is for the previous 15 minutes. If your 15-minute load average is high, but the 1-minute load is low, you had a major spike in activity that has passed. How well did your system hold up? On the other hand, if the 15-minute value is low, but the 1-minute average is high, something happened within the last 60 seconds and may still be going on now. If all of the load averages are high, the condition has persisted for the whole 15 minutes. Uptime The last entry on the first line is the uptime (x), or how long the system has been running. The system in our example has been up for one hour and six minutes, and the current time is 08:12:26. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out when the system booted. Process Counts On the second line you’ll find information about processes that are currently running on the system (y). Running processes are actually doing work; they’re answering user requests, handling mail, or whatever else is going on. Sleeping processes are waiting for input from one source or another, and are just fine. Processes in other states are usually waiting for a resource to become available, or are hung in some way. Large numbers of nonsleeping, nonrunnable processes can be a hint of trouble. Investigate further to find out which processes those are. Process Types The CPU states line (z) indicates what percentage of available time the CPU spends handling different types of processes and other duties. It shows five different process types: user, nice, system, interrupt, and idle. User processes are average everyday programs; they could be daemons run by root, commands run by regular users, or whatever. If it shows up on the list of system processes (that is, on ps -ax), it’s a user process. Nice processes are those whose priority has been deliberately manipulated by the user. We’ll look at this in some detail in “Reprioritizing with Niceness.” System processes are in the kernel, and they include things such as virtual memory handlers, running networking, writing to the disk, and so on. The interrupt category shows how much time the system spends handling interrupt requests (IRQs). Lastly, the idle process shows how much time the system spends doing absolutely nothing. If your system CPU regularly has a very low idle time, you might want to start thinking about rescheduling some jobs or getting a faster processor. Note When you’re working on a multi-CPU system, keep in mind that top displays the average usage among all the processors. You might have one processor completely tied up compiling something, but if the other processor is idle, top will show only 50 percent usage. 409
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