vmstat and iostat us/sy/id numbers wrong?

[John Baldwin]

On Saturday 05 December 2009 9:19:06 am Stefan Bethke wrote:
> I'm confused about the numbers shown in the last three columns in both 
vmstat and iostat. They should reflect percent of CPU time spent on user 
processes, system threads, and the idle thread (or something like that).
> 
> On multiple machines running 8-stable from the last couple of days, the 
numbers do not agree with actual system usage and with numbers shown by top, 
at all.  I'm seeing 7 7 87 on one box, 0 0 100 on another, and 10 3 87 on a 
third.  The numbers stay the same even under different loads.
> 
> Am I misunderstanding what those numbers should represent?

Are you just running vmstat once or using 'vmstat 1' to have it poll?  If you 
are running it once, note that the numbers vmstat report are the percentage of 
system/user/idle time since boot rather than during the previous second which 
is what top reports (and what 'vmstat 1' reports after the first line).

-- 
John Baldwin