On Tue, Aug 10, 1999 at 06:45:07PM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> >> 6:58pm up 1 day, 9:37, 1 user, load average: 1.77, 1.60,
> >> 1.00
> >> 38 processes: 34 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> >> CPU states: 8.6% user, 60.2% system, 0.0% nice, 31.3% idle
> >>
> >> The only active process on my system is "tar". Is it normal to
> >> see system CPU usage at 60% when untarring things, or is this odd
> >> behaviour?
> >>
> >> The system this is occuring on is a cobalt RAQ2 system running
> >> Linux 2.0.34 modified.
> >>
> >> Just curious...
> >
> >The %-number is the cpu-time-user / real-time-since-start-of-process * 100.
> >So that number makes sense, like on every Linux system.
>
> It wasn't the fact that tar was using 60% of the CPU bandwidth
> that bothered me, rather the fact that the 60% was in "system"
> time - in kernel. I would think that tar would be 60-100% in
> 'user', and low on "system".
>
> That was what I saw as odd.
Ahh, ok. Well, tar spends most of it's time in the kernel; it's
almost completly I/O-bound. Also the Qube's low memory performance
shows up in a higher system CPU ratio.
Ralf
