please help me make sense of top's CPU output

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Nov 02), Chris Stankevitz said:
> I recently performed a CPU intensive task with Xorg.  When I completed the
> task and Xorg no longer was using the CPU, I got this result from top:
> 
> ===
> 
> last pid:  1201;  load averages:  0.24,  0.10,  0.09    up 0+00:29:42
> 63 processes:  1 running, 62 sleeping
> CPU:  1.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.0% idle
> Mem: 161M Active, 67M Inact, 68M Wired, 1240K Cache, 41M Buf, 1676M Free
> Swap: 4060M Total, 4060M Free
> 
>   PID USERNAME     THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME    CPU
>  1017 cstankevitz    1 104    0   366M   331M select 0   3:25 35.89% Xorg

The CPU column in the process list is a decaying average (more useful to the
kernel scheduler than an instantaneous value).  You'll see it slowly drop to
0 over 10-15 seconds.

Junior Hacker Project: add an instantaneous-CPU value (calculated by
subtracting successive ki_runtime values) to the list of things top
calculates and toggle it and weighted-CPU when pressing C.  The toggling
code is already there; it just toggles between two different weighted-cpu
values at the moment.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com