On Thu, 2006-Aug-17 10:57:04 -0400, Bill LeFebvre wrote:
>Dan Nelson wrote:
>>I just built top-3.6 on such a system, though, and it does report a
>>simple "main(){for(;;);}" process as consuming 100 %CPU. Maybe you're
>>thinking of Solaris's own prstat command?
>
>Heh. I released 3.6 with new SunOS code that didn't adjust for number of
>cpus, and someone flagged the behavior as a bug. So you're right: 3.6
>doesn't do it this way. But 3.5 did, and it seems at least some people
>prefer it that way.I actually prefer this new behaviour. One of my major uses of top is identifying processes that are spinning for one reason or another. Having a process show up as 99-100% is quite obvious and I can then look closer to see if that process is validly using 100% CPU or not. Having a process using 3.1% CPU (on a 32-CPU system) would be far less obvious. (In my case, I'm scanning instaneous top outputs from ~60 hosts so I don't want to have to study each output too closely). To my way of thinking, %CPU is a percentage of a single CPU. If a box has 32 CPUs, then maximum load is 3200% of a single CPU. I think there are probably equally good rationales for each approach. Probably the best situation is a flag to toggle between the two approaches, together with two different titles to make it clear which is being used. -- Peter Jeremy
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