On Mon, 28 Nov 2005, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
Hello, On the CPU row of top, there's various stuff displayed: 'us' (which I assume is CPU cycles consumed by processes owned by the user running top), 'sy' (which I assume is those owned by root), 'id' (which I assume means idle), and there is 'wa', 'hi', 'si' whose meaning I don't know. I checked on the manpage without success... Could anyone tell me what these last 3 (wa, hi, si) mean.
us is 'user' meaning any process regardless of owner running in user space. User space is unpriviledged processes without hardware access like the kernel.
sy is system. Regardless of user it's CPU cycles used by threads inside the kernel e.g. working for processes asking for hardware access.
id is idlewa is wait which is CPU cycles wasted on waiting for hardware especially disk, access.
hi I've never seen si must be swap in? Meaning pages swapped in from swap space. Regards, Henrik Morsing