cpu eater

[Robbo]

Can't find these in the manual but a google found...

us  regular user apps
sy  system (general kernel stuff)
ni  nice user apps (low-priority tasks)
id  idle
wa  waiting for IO to complete
hi  hard interrupt (IRQ) handlers
si  soft interrupt (network stack, mostly?) handlers


wa, mainly means waiting on hardware (?), check with the "dmesg"  
command and the file /var/log/messages to see if your getting any  
errors, etc.


On 12 Mar 2006, at 17:52, Alex wrote:

> Hallo boys and girls,
> Lately I noticed that something/someone is eating up my cpu.
> ie. when I launch digikam (with a lot of photos) here's what's  
> going on:
>
> alex at playland:~$ top
> top - 19:12:45 up  2:33,  1 user,  load average: 2.95, 1.41, 0.87
> Tasks:  84 total,   1 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  2.3% us,  0.7% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 96.7% wa,  0.0%  
> hi,  0.3% si
> Mem:    516300k total,   508124k used,     8176k free,    41436k  
> buffers
> Swap:  1510068k total,    12532k used,  1497536k free,   153944k  
> cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>  8652 root      15   0  343m  85m 3580 S  0.3 17.0   4:08.83 Xorg
>  8928 alex      15   0  101m  48m  25m S  0.3  9.7   2:25.94 amarokapp
> 14460 alex      16   0  2128 1084  844 R  0.3  0.2   0:00.06 top
>     1 root      16   0  1560  528  460 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.10 init
>     2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00  
> ksoftirqd/0
>     3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.17 events/0
>     4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01 khelper
>     5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthread
>     7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
>   123 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.31 kblockd/0
>   149 root      15   0     0    0    0 D  0.0  0.0   0:00.26 pdflush
>   150 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:01.03 pdflush
>   152 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
>   151 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.71 kswapd0
>   737 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kseriod
>
>
> No process is using more than 0.3% of the cpu but there is 96.7% wa.
>
> For starters wtf is that wa? :)
> and for a second question, do you have any ideas of what could be  
> causing
> this, where to look or what more info you might need? (I know these  
> are three
> questions... :) )
>
> ubuntu-5.10/linux-2.6.12-10-k7
> -- 
> Cheers, Alex
> -- 
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