System Cpu Between 50-70% and need to find out why

[Paul]

Dear Max,

Thanks for your reply. It was really appreciated.

Here is an output from running: "systat -vmstat 1" based on your 
suggestion. Below is the result. Does the cpu Interrupts (2000 each 
for the 1 second period) seem an issue?

Thanks

Paul

  Interrupts
8853 total
      atkbd0 1
10 sio0 irq4
      ata0 irq14
468 em0 irq17
329 em1 em2 18
          uhci0 uhci
20 arcmsr0 26
2006 cpu0: time
2006 cpu1: time
2007 cpu2: time
2007 cpu3: time


  4 users    Load 19.21 17.14 13.04                  Apr 22 22:41

Mem:KB    REAL            VIRTUAL                       VN PAGER   SWAP PAGER
         Tot   Share      Tot    Share    Free           in   out     in   out
Act 1559704   36276  2875420    40580 8088352  count
All 2193788  117604 28661808   253912          pages

Proc:
   r   p   d   s   w   Csw  Trp  Sys  Int  Sof  Flt
  15         201   2  2781 1344 8179 1523   43 1243

65.0%Sys   7.8%Intr 22.5%User  0.7%Nice  4.1%Idle
|         |        |         |    |          |          |          | 
         |         |         |
=================================+++>>>>>>>>>>>>

Disks   da0 pass0 pass1                            365252 wire
KB/t  74.98  0.00  0.00                           2010724 act
tps      40     0     0                           5575792 inact
MB/s   2.93  0.00  0.00                              1292 cache
%busy    60     0     0                           8087036 free
                                                    219632 buf

At 07:54 PM 22/04/2007, Max Laier wrote:
>On Monday 23 April 2007 00:52, Paul wrote:
> > >Uh you had the right idea but forgot to paste the relevant bits ;-)
> > >
> > >top *is* the tool for working out what processes are using your CPU.
> > >Although your high load average suggests that your system is just
> > >heavily loaded and it is expected that it will be using 100% CPU.