TOP shows above 100% WCPU usage

[Peter Jeremy]

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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