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How do I Find Out Linux CPU Utilization?

by Vivek Gite on April 6, 2006 120 comments Whenever a Linux system CPU is occupied by a process, it is unavailable for processing other requests. Rest of pending requests must wait till CPU is free. This becomes a bottleneck in the system. Following command will help you to identify CPU utilization, so that you can troubleshoot CPU related performance problems. Finding CPU utilization is one of the important tasks. Linux comes with various utilities to report CPU utilization. With these commands, you will be able to find out: * CPU utilization * Display the utilization of each CPU individually (SMP cpu) * Find out your system's average CPU utilization since the last reboot etc * Determine which process is eating the CPU(s)

Old good top command to find out Linux cpu load

The top program provides a dynamic real-time view of a running system. It can display system summary information as well as a list of tasks currently being managed by the Linux kernel. The top command monitors CPU utilization, process statistics, and memory utilization. The top section contains information related to overall system status - uptime, load average, process counts, CPU status, and utilization statistics for both memory and swap space. Top command to find out Linux cpu usage Type the top command:
$ top

Output:

You can see Linux CPU utilization under CPU stats. The tasks share of the elapsed CPU time since the last screen update, expressed as a percentage of total CPU time. In a true SMP environment (multiple CPUS), top will operate in number of CPUs. Please note that you need to type q key to exit the top command display. The top command produces a frequently-updated list of processes. By default, the processes are ordered by percentage of CPU usage, with only the "top" CPU consumers shown. The top command shows how much processing power and memory are being used, as well as other information about the running processes.

Find Linux CPU utilization using mpstat and other tools

Please note that you need to install special package called sysstat to take advantage of following commands. This package includes system performance tools for Linux (Red Hat Linux / RHEL includes these tools by default).
# apt-get install sysstat

Use up2date command if you are using RHEL:

# up2date sysstat

Display the utilization of each CPU individually using mpstat

If you are using SMP (Multiple CPU) system, use mpstat command to display the utilization of each CPU individually. It report processors related statistics. For example, type command:

# mpstat

Output:
Thursday 06 April 2006 %nice 0.00 %sys %iowait 2.87 1.09 %irq 0.07 %soft 0.02 %steal 0.00 %idle 79.42 intr/s 830.06

Linux 2.6.15.4 (debian) 05:13:05 05:13:05 IST IST CPU all %user 16.52

The mpstat command display activities for each available processor, processor 0 being the first one. Global average activities among all processors are also reported. The mpstat command can be used both on SMP and UP machines, but in the latter, only global average activities will be printed.:
# mpstat -P ALL

Output:
Linux 2.6.15.4 (wwwportal1.xxxx.co.in) 05:14:58 05:14:58 05:14:58 05:14:58 IST IST IST IST CPU all 0 1 %user 16.46 16.46 15.77 %nice 0.00 0.00 2.70 Thursday 06 April 2006 %sys %iowait 2.88 1.08 2.88 1.08 3.17 2.01 %irq 0.07 0.07 0.05 %soft 0.02 0.02 0.03 %steal 0.00 0.00 0.00 %idle 79.48 79.48 81.44 intr/s 835.96 835.96 822.54

Another output from my HP Dual Opteron 64 bit server:# mpstat -P ALLOutput:

Linux 2.6.5-7.252-smp (ora9.xxx.in) 07:44:18 07:44:18 07:44:18 07:44:18 07:44:18 07:44:18 CPU all 0 1 2 3 %user 3.01 5.87 1.79 2.19 2.17 04/07/06 %irq 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.03 %soft 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 %idle 39.19 24.16 49.02 54.73 28.83 intr/s 1063.46 262.11 268.92 260.96 271.47

%nice %system %iowait 57.31 0.36 0.13 69.47 0.44 0.05 48.59 0.36 0.23 42.63 0.28 0.16 68.56 0.34 0.06

Report CPU utilization using sar command

You can display todays CPU activity, with sar command:
# sar

Output:
Linux 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp (dellbox.xyz.co.in) 12:00:02 12:10:01 12:20:01 12:30:02 12:40:01 12:50:01 01:00:01 ... ..... .. 04:40:01 04:50:01 05:00:01 05:10:01 05:20:02 Average: AM AM AM AM AM AM AM CPU all all all all all all %user 1.05 0.74 1.09 0.76 1.25 0.80 %nice 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 %system 0.28 0.34 0.28 0.21 0.32 0.24 01/13/2007 %iowait 0.04 0.38 0.10 0.03 0.03 0.03 %idle 98.64 98.54 98.53 99.00 98.40 98.92

AM AM AM AM AM

all all all all all all

8.39 8.68 7.10 8.78 8.30 3.09

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

33.17 37.51 30.48 37.74 35.45 9.14

0.06 0.04 0.04 0.03 0.06 0.09

58.38 53.78 62.39 53.44 56.18 87.68

Comparison of CPU utilization The sar command writes to standard output the contents of selected cumulative activity counters in the operating system. The accounting system, based on the values in the count and interval parameters. For example display comparison of CPU utilization; 2 seconds apart; 5 times, use:
# sar -u 2 5

Output (for each 2 seconds. 5 lines are displayed):

Linux 2.6.9-42.0.3.ELsmp (www1lab2.xyz.ac.in) 05:33:24 05:33:26 05:33:28 05:33:30 05:33:32 05:33:34 Average: AM AM AM AM AM AM CPU all all all all all all %user 9.50 16.79 17.21 16.75 14.29 14.91 %nice 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 %system 49.00 74.69 80.30 81.00 72.43 71.49 01/13/2007 %iowait 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 %idle 41.50 8.52 2.49 2.25 13.28 13.61

Where, -u 12 5 : Report CPU utilization. The following values are displayed: %user: Percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level (application). %nice: Percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the user level with nice priority. %system: Percentage of CPU utilization that occurred while executing at the system level (kernel). %iowait: Percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle during which the system had an outstanding disk I/O request. %idle: Percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle and the system did not have an outstanding disk I/O request. To get multiple samples and multiple reports set an output file for the sar command. Run the sar command as a background process using.
# sar -o output.file 12 8 >/dev/null 2>&1 &

Better use nohup command so that you can logout and check back report later on:
# nohup sar -o output.file 12 8 >/dev/null 2>&1 &

All data is captured in binary form and saved to a file (data.file). The data can then be selectively displayed ith the sar command using the -f option.
# sar -f data.file

Task: Find out who is monopolizing or eating the CPUs

Finally, you need to determine which process is monopolizing or eating the CPUs. Following command will displays the top 10 CPU users on the Linux system.
# ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -k 1 -r | head -10

OR
# ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

Output:
%CPU 96 0.7 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.2 0.0 0.0 PID 2148 3358 29129 29128 29127 29126 2177 9 8 USER vivek mysql lighttpd lighttpd lighttpd lighttpd vivek root root

COMMAND /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu 64-bit/Ubuntu 64-bit.vmx -@ "" /usr/libexec/mysqld --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/m /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php [vmware-rtc] [kacpid] [khelper]

Now you know vmware-vmx process is eating up lots of CPU power. ps command displays every process (-e) with a user-defined format (-o pcpu). First field is pcpu (cpu utilization). It is sorted in reverse order to display top 10 CPU eating process.

iostat command
You can also use iostat command which report Central Processing Unit (CPU) statistics and input/output statistics for devices and partitions. It can be use to find out your system's average CPU utilization since the last reboot. # iostatOutput:
Linux 2.6.15.4 (debian) Thursday 06 April 2006

avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 16.36 0.00 2.99 1.06 0.00 79.59 Device: hda hdb hdc sda tps 0.00 6.43 0.03 0.00 Blk_read/s 0.00 85.57 0.16 0.00 Blk_wrtn/s 0.00 166.74 0.00 0.00 Blk_read 16 875340 1644 24 Blk_wrtn 0 1705664 0 0

You may want to use following command, which gives you three outputs every 5 seconds (as previous command gives information since the last reboot):$ iostat xtc 5 3

GUI tools for your laptops/desktops

Above tools/commands are quite useful on remote server. For local system with X GUI installed you can try out gnome-system-monitor. It allows you to view and control the processes running on your system. You can access detailed memory maps, send signals, and terminate the processes.
$ gnome-system-monitor

(Click to enlarge image) In addition, the gnome-system-monitor provides an overall view of the resource usage on your system, including memory and CPU allocation.

(Click to enlarge image)

Further readings
For more information and command option please read man pages of top, iostat, mpstat, sar, ps commands. Featured Articles: 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know 20 Linux Server Hardening Security Tips My 10 UNIX Command Line Mistakes The Novice Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop 10 Greatest Open Source Software Of 2009 Top 5 Email Client For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Users Top 20 OpenSSH Server Best Security Practices Top 10 Open Source Web-Based Project Management Software Top 5 Linux Video Editor Software { 119 comments read them below or add one } 1 Yuchi April 7, 2006 Sounds interesting Reply 2 Anonymous April 7, 2006 Never knew the mpstat command. Thanks for post. You got kick ass info :D Reply 3 Anonymous July 27, 2006 So you have 4 processors shown on your dual opteron machine which means that 2 of them are virtual. How do youfilter these out when you want to see only raw info on real processor utilization? Thanks Nikola Reply 4 Anonymous July 27, 2006 I need to explain better i think: so i have 4 processors and what if only 2 are working and i still see 4 because of additional virtual processors? How do i check that? Plz answer its really important to me. Thanks in advance, Nikola Reply 5 nixcraft July 28, 2006 If cpu entry not present in /proc/interrupts file your cpu is offline or not working for some causes: less /proc/interrupts You can also goto directory /sys/devices/system/cpu (note following commands needs special configuration option via kernel. If it is not complied it will not work for you): cd /sys/devices/system/cpu Type ls command to see all cpus ls Output: cpu0 cpu1 cpu2 cpu3 cpu4 cpu5 cpu6 cpu7 Inside this directory you will see entry for online or offline CPU Hope this helps Reply 6 Ashok November 7, 2006 Thanks for the commands i really could use the iostat command and get some answers.. Thanks Again !! :) Reply 7 nixcraft November 8, 2006 Ashok, I am glad commands and help presented here helping out. Appreciate your post. Reply

8 chadi December 29, 2006 hi all i have a prob i use top and i have mysql has a %cpu 99.5 and i use mpstat but i have not the same results why with us and sy and ni i have smp linux rehl3 Reply 9 nixcraft December 29, 2006 MySQL is generally use more disk i/o; use iostat to get detailed information. You need to optimize mysql and also get fast SCSI hard disk. Reply 10 Planet Malaysia January 15, 2007 Yeah! Now I know new command mpstat Reply 11 Pdraig Brady January 15, 2007 This is the command I use to see whos using CPU: ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args sort pcpu | sed /^ 0.0 /d That and more here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html#monitor Reply 12 nixcraft January 15, 2007 Pdraig, Good syntax, just to list top 10, sorting should be -pcpu and pipe to head -10
ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args sort -pcpu | sed /^ 0.0 /d | head -10

Appreciate your post. Reply 13 Markus Sorensson January 15, 2007 Ok, I can measure the cpu utilization but what is the criteria to determine when a cpu is overloaded? Please let me know! Reply 14 SpongeMucker January 15, 2007 Good Article. However, you neglected to mention vmstat. One of the nice things about vmstat is that it provides an insight into how the queues are filling up on each processor. Also, vmstat comes with just about every default install of UNIX and Linux that I have ever seen, so there are no additional files which need to be installed. vmstat is also very scriptable, if you need to log the cpu usage at intervals of time. Hope that this helps. Thanks again for a good article. Reply 15 jon January 15, 2007 Just FYI on fedora machines, youll need to: $ yum install sysstat To install the sysstat package which contains (most of) the binaries listed in this article. Reply 16 nixcraft January 15, 2007 @Markus when you see CPU load >=70% @SpongeMucker: yup vmstat is good tool => http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-resource-utilization-to-detect-system-bottlenecks.html. I will update post with vmstat link. @ jon : thanks for pointing out fedora core issue. Appreciate all of your posts. Reply 17 JM January 15, 2007 htop works great for me. Its a little easier on the eyes than regular old top. Reply 18 Santiago January 21, 2007 You can use the atop utility(Monitor for system resources and process activity) Reply 19 nixcraft January 22, 2007

19 nixcraft January 22, 2007 Santiago/jm Yup, atop/htop is also useful. Appreciate your posts. Reply 20 drown February 1, 2007 yes its very good explaination.. but how can one get this information like cpu usage into a program.. say C code?.. say i wanted cpu usage into my float variable.. please help.. thnks in advance Reply 21 nixcraft February 1, 2007 Drown, I am not sure about C API. Reply 22 blackice February 5, 2007 @19. nixcraft Thanks, htop worked great for debian sarge, mpstat didnt worked very well. Reply 23 Puneet April 16, 2007 Thanks manhelped a lot..:) ~Puneet Reply 24 Vishal June 6, 2007 Thanks a lot it is really helpful.!! Reply 25 Diptanjan June 12, 2007 This is really a wonderful article Learned a lot from this And thank you all the readers for posting valuable comments with different commands.. this is really helpful for people like me. Diptanjan Reply 26 Ramanath June 29, 2007 This is a nice and informative article. Can anyone suggest any command to monitor a process is using which cpu in SMP environment. I mean suppose I am running sshd. How do I know it is using cpu0 or cpu1 ? Reply 27 benny July 6, 2007 Thanks a lot for the post. Its really helpful. Reply 28 MG July 18, 2007 very good informationit would be good if we can have at least some hints on whether the stats shown is still ok or need to check on other items Reply 29 colbert August 24, 2007 thanks for the tips. its good read for my day to day job Reply 30 invisible September 13, 2007 Really good article. I have a following question what is the best way to find out which process(es) was(were) using cpu(s) for certain period of time based on cpu utilization threshold? Lets imagine that we want to find all processes triggering CPU utilization beyond 70% for more then 10 seconds during last 24 hours and dump such an information in a log with the snapshots of time of occurrence, process ID and command.

information in a log with the snapshots of time of occurrence, process ID and command. Anyone has an idea how to setup such a monitoring in an elegant way? Thanks, invisible Reply 31 laga October 2, 2007 Thanks for the mpstat command! Reply 32 zhili wang October 8, 2007 One of our server has four CPUs, but when I use mpstat or top, I can only see one CPU. In the directory /sys/devices/system/cpu, only show cpu0. But we do have 4 cpu, and OS admin told me all four cpu are runing. How do I know all four cpus are runing properly and I can use it. Thanks for any help. Reply 33 vivek October 8, 2007 zhili, Install SMP Linux kernel RPM / package and reboot the box. Run top or cat /proc/cpuinfo command to confirm CPU count Reply 34 zhili wang October 8, 2007 my server has four CPUs, but when I issue vmstat and top, I can only see one cpu. In the directory:/sys/devices/system/cpu, I can see only one cpu cpu0. When I issue command:less /proc/interrupts, it only show one cpu. But there are do have four cpu on the server, should I do something to configure it, what should I do. Thanks for any help. Reply 35 zhili wang October 8, 2007 Vivek, Thank you for your help, I will let Linux Admin here do it. Reply 36 vivek October 8, 2007 >should I do something to configure it, what should I do Yup, ask your admin to install Linux SMP kernel and boot into the same using Grub. Once booted using SMP, run uname -a to verify that SMP kernel loaded. Also go through /proc/cpuinfo file. less /proc/cpuinfo Reply 37 zhili wang October 8, 2007 The Linux Admin told me kernel-smp are package for free linux and some old version, we runing advanced linux version and do not need it, it confused me. Is it true? Reply 38 zhili wang October 10, 2007 Thanks for all the help. It is clear now, we did not install smp linux kernel, so there is only one cpu working. Could any one tell me when install Redhat linux on multip cpu server, it will automatically configure to smp kernel or have to maually select the kernel? Reply 39 vivek October 10, 2007 zhili, In most cases it is installed by default but sometime installer cannot detect it and it will install normal kernel. Run yum / up2date command to install SMP kernel from RHN. Reply 40 zhili wang October 11, 2007 Vivek, It is very helpful. Thank you. Reply 41 olfat November 4, 2007

i find this howto article very useful. thank you! Reply 42 ben November 16, 2007 is there a GUI version of a CPU usage monitor for KDE? im using fedora 8 Reply 43 Daton December 5, 2007 Hi, I have a question about iostat command. How can I see the %utilization of disk not %utilization of CPU? I have found out from some of the forums and man page for iostat that the disk utilization report ought to show one parameter called %util. And also somewhere I have found a flag -D to show it but I cannot find anywhere how to configure my command so that it shows this %util field. Any help is highly appreciated. Thank you. Reply 44 vivek December 5, 2007 Daton, Sometime man page can be confusing..just run iostat -d -x to display disk utilization including %util. It will show TPS (number of transfers per second ) and amount of data read and/or wrtite to/from the device. Try following examples,
iostat -d -x iostat -d -m -x iostat -x -d 2

All you have to do is pass -x option. Reply 45 Madivanan December 7, 2007 everything in a nutshell..excellent Good info Reply 46 Siddharth December 8, 2007 Very useful information and very well presented! Thanks! Reply 47 uncleremus January 10, 2008 You forgot the nicest monitoring tool of them all: gkrellm. Small, fast, nice-looking, must have. Check it out. Reply 48 Vitaly January 20, 2008 when we see that certain process takes 10% of CPU and we have 2 CPU server, does it mean it is 10% from one CPU (==5% of server CPU power ) or 10% from server CPU power (==20% of one CPU) Reply 49 Jamie January 21, 2008 HI nice tute! Same question as Vitaly above. Ina 2 cpus enviroenmnt does the cpu usage percentage mean the percentage the process takes of 2 cpu or both. Please see the above exmple by Vitaly. Also in your image of the top output. The cpu usage vales for the processes add up to a value (26.8%) greater than the total cpu usage value 23.%) Reply 50 Jacob January 31, 2008 You forgot ksysguard in your GUI section. It has a LOT more monitoring ability than the gnome-system-monitor. Heres a nice article covering its pros and cons: http://www.linux.com/articles/113700 Reply 51 Pirkia.lt admin February 2, 2008 top command is better use with argument c (you will get more information):
top c

Reply 52 Linux In Israel February 23, 2008 Great article! sar is not so popular as it should be Reply

53 Nicolas March 31, 2008 Great intro to CPU usage. Thanks. The top 10 monopolizing process would be better if sorted as a numberic key :
ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -k 1 -r -n | head -10

Reply 54 Michael May 9, 2008 I have a dual core system. When I type mpstat -P ALL 10:52:18 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s 10:52:18 PM all 14.33 0.13 2.49 0.43 0.03 0.18 0.00 82.41 151.04 10:52:18 PM 0 15.47 0.13 2.47 0.33 0.00 0.01 0.00 81.59 0.00 10:52:18 PM 1 13.21 0.13 2.51 0.53 0.07 0.35 0.00 83.21 151.04 10:52:18 PM 2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 What is CPU 2? Reply 55 Satya May 28, 2008 Hi All, Today is 5/28/2008 but I ran some performance tests during 5/7/2008.I need to capture the measurements for both Memory and CPU using SAR commands for each of 1 minute interval. Is it possible? If yes, what commands should I need to use? I appreciate your input here. Thanks Satya Reply 56 Giuseppe May 29, 2008 What do you think about cyclesoak? I wonder if you could provide some example by using it as well. Reply 57 s5h July 20, 2008 Thanks for writing this, its a very good document about how to use proc. Excellent work. Things like this should be in the kernel docs but they just arent. Thanks for filling in the gaps. Reply 58 Laena September 17, 2008 hmmm. how will i make use of the sourcecode used by top command in calling the program to display the processes, to be used in my bankers program in C, to test how bankers handle thing in real timethanks Reply 59 Will October 14, 2008 Thanks for the mpstat command. I have a question on how to interpret the CPU usage output from all those commands (top, mpstat, etc) As from my understanding, when a core is doing stuffs, it is fully occupied, i.e. always 100%. So, is the CPU usage meaning the % use of this CPU since the last reboot? Or is it meaning the % use within a timeframe? Thanks Reply 60 Will October 14, 2008 Just to add information to my question above. For mpstat, there is a INTERVAL param. If it is set as 2 seconds, does the output mean the average % CPU usage just within that 2 seconds timeframe? Thanks. Reply 61 Deano October 31, 2008 This was really helpful, thanks! Reply 62 James November 3, 2008 Is there a way to query the overall system usage say in a Perl script or something? I have a low power Linux (or XP it could be) box and want it to postpone some activity for 5 minutes if the CPU loading is say over 30%.

In simple terms If CPU Usage > 30% then Wait 300 Seconds Can that be done?Reply 63 Priya November 8, 2008 i want to know how can we find the processor id of a system with two processors through linux using c Reply 64 Louis Wang December 31, 2008 Vivek, Great article! I have a question. I am confused by %CPU in top. One user process used 100% CPU, but the system still have 89% idle, not 0% idle. How to understand it? Regards, Louis $ top |head -8 top 12:50:45 up 33 days, 19:32, 4 users, load average: 1.06, 1.05, 1.00 Tasks: 234 total, 2 running, 229 sleeping, 1 stopped, 2 zombie Cpu(s): 9.1%us, 1.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 89.0%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3894760k total, 3708140k used, 186620k free, 239680k buffers Swap: 2031608k total, 17700k used, 2013908k free, 2374436k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3595 otrs 25 0 26712 21m 3840 R 99 0.6 17931:35 PostMasterMailb $ mpstat -P ALL Linux 2.6.18-8.el5 (xxxxxxxxx) 12/31/2008 12:54:42 PM CPU %user %nice %sys %iowait %irq %soft %steal %idle intr/s 12:54:42 PM all 9.09 0.00 1.67 0.07 0.01 0.13 0.00 89.03 1018.11 12:54:42 PM 0 1.93 0.00 0.31 0.11 0.00 0.03 0.00 97.62 255.65 12:54:42 PM 1 9.78 0.00 1.68 0.04 0.01 0.13 0.00 88.37 254.53 12:54:42 PM 2 2.48 0.00 0.40 0.11 0.00 0.03 0.00 96.97 253.35 12:54:42 PM 3 22.16 0.00 4.31 0.02 0.01 0.35 0.00 73.16 254.58 Reply 65 Vivek Gite December 31, 2008 Louis, It may be possible that user is using 100% CPU core or one of other CPU in multiprocessor system. Reply 66 Ramesh January 5, 2009 Hi Vivek, that is a goos article. hope you can help me in this small issue. i have got lighttpd running and i need to develop test cases and run tests provide dynamic content with HTML. use options like cgi, fastcgi, ajax etc. i want to monitor the resource usage of lighttpd during each test. please do reply. thanks Reply 67 Ramesh January 5, 2009 sorry.. i mean..good..type(goos)..sorry Reply 68 Youvedeep Singh January 17, 2009 Hi all Its a nice article I want to relate the CPU utilization with the energy consumed by the ststem, is there any way to do so. Or there is an alternate way to find the energy consumed by all the processes. Regards Youvedeep Singh Reply 69 Vikrant January 26, 2009 Hey all! Nice article Can anyone tell me where is this information stored? For example in unix systems at /proc/uptime gives information of uptime of the system and the value is dynamic since it would be different every time you poll. Which file stores such information for CPU utilization? So I can cat and get the information that how

dynamic since it would be different every time you poll. Which file stores such information for CPU utilization? So I can cat and get the information that how much CPU has been utilized? Any help is appreciated. Best Regards Vikrant Reply 70 Tony September 8, 2010 You can try to use /proc/stat to calculate CPU utilization. If the information is displayed like this: cpu 607557 143290 385125 136873807 1279793 18764 14856 0 0 To get the average system load over any given amount of time you read only the first four values into variable (for example, ill call them u1, n1, s1, and i1). Then when youre ready you read the values again into new variables, u2, n2, s2, and i2. Now your total usage time is equal to (u2-u1) + (n2 n1) + (s2 s1). And your total time overall is the usage time + (i2-i1). Take (100*usage)/total and you have your percent CPU Usage. Reply 71 shapirus January 30, 2009 Can someone please explain me how can it be when /proc/stats shows 414% total CPU usage (including the idle time) on a quad-core single processor box? Example: $ cat /proc/stat|grep ^cpu ;sleep 100;cat /proc/stat|grep ^cpu cpu 102843 0 66548 4308888 773304 9547 30153 0 0 cpu 103568 0 67109 4345597 776311 9655 30471 0 0 if we subtract the sets of numbers from each other, divide by 100 and sum them, well find that they add up to 414.28. How can it be? I use RHEL 5 with 2.6.28.2 kernel with dynamic ticks and multi-core scheduler support. Thanks. Reply 72 Tony September 8, 2010 The average CPU usage is: (103568-102843 + 0-0 + 67109-66548)/(4345597-4308888) =0.0350322809 only 3.5%, but the estimation is not accurate Reply 73 shapirus January 31, 2009 Found it out. The bug (feature?) was in the CONFIG_NO_HZ option. I guess the kernel calculates the idle time inaccurately when the dynamic ticks are turned on. However I also have a few other 32-bit boxes (that one was 64-bit) where this issue does not occur and one 32-bit where it does. Weird. Reply 74 Youvedeep Singh February 2, 2009 hi In one of my college project i require the energy consumed by the System. Is there any way to find the Power/Energy consumed by the CPU/Disk/IOs. If anyone is aware of any of such method, please reply fast, i require it urgently. Regards Youvedeep Singh Reply 75 Nicholas February 20, 2009 How I get the word size (32bit or 64bit) of a particular server running on Linux Linux express.sagt.com.lk 2.6.9-34.ELsmp #1 SMP Fri Feb 24 16:54:53 EST 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux Thanks Nic Reply 76 J_Tom_Moon_79 February 22, 2009 # on fedora core (can install with yum) $ dstat Reply 77 J_Tom_Moon_79 February 22, 2009 # (to find more, just hunt through the output of this cmd) $ yum search stat Reply

Reply 78 J_Tom_Moon_79 February 23, 2009 # (or manually search through the output of yum) $ yum search stat Reply 79 mohamed March 1, 2009 I found this article really helpful, thank you, keep up the good work. Reply 80 Tini March 26, 2009 This article really helped me a lot. Thanks a lot Reply 81 nic April 2, 2009 Using k -pcpu will accomplish the reverse sorting as well (including taking care of proper numeric sorting on multi-cpu machines): ps k -pcpu -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | head -10 Reply 82 Sanjay May 15, 2009 Thanks a ton!!! very awesome article and this whole long thread :) Reply 83 Pavel May 19, 2009 hi hi well. i have 1question.. ahmm.letme se. ihave a Red hat 5 linux and glassfish aplication server an when i try to monitoring the server i see something like . well . top 17:41:08 up 1 day, 6:37, 4 users, load average: 1.12, 1.12, 1.11 Tasks: 159 total, 1 running, 153 sleeping, 5 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 26.5%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 73.1%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3365124k total, 3124404k used, 240720k free, 4400k buffers Swap: 8385888k total, 246344k used, 8139544k free, 71892k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 12001 root 20 0 1633m 593m 11m S 102 18.0 218:19.97 java 28432 root 22 0 1641m 330m 13m S 2 10.1 2:06.12 java 28611 root 25 0 1642m 228m 12m S 2 6.9 2:25.95 java 28528 root 19 0 2253m 920m 13m S 1 28.0 10:43.70 java 1 root 15 0 2036 556 524 S 0 0.0 0:00.84 as u can see mi cpu its burning or something like that . someone knows why a glassfish domain only increese i mindjust eat ram memory. someone knows.. why.. jus whyy !!! why!!!!! T_T Reply 84 Vivek Gite May 20, 2009 Your load average looks normal to me. Run free -m command to see memory usage. Reply 85 Pavel May 20, 2009 ahmm.. really?.. well. ahm. the server in the graphic mode runs to slowly and welllits a little server i think cuz just have 3.5gb in Ram , but as u can se in my example the proces quickly the ram downsi mind i dont know i think Reply 86 Joe July 2, 2009 Good info here. I like the top|head -5! in particular everything in one nutshell. Can someone please explain the CPU load percentage as it relates to multi-core or multi-cpu machines. If I see a load of 1.57 (157%) on a Xeon (quad processor), is that 1.57 out of a possible 4.00, or are all 4 CPUs running flat out and swapping the 57% overhead? Also, is there an easy way to get a CPU count to adjust the load statistic if needed? From the above the best I got was cat /proc/cpuinfo|grep processor|wc -l but I dont suspect it would port from RedHat to a Sun, HP or AIX box. Reply 87 Avish Aren July 3, 2009 On a machine with 4 processors running Linux, what would a CPU load of 2 mean? Reply 88 Avish Aren July 3, 2009 Show me a command that would search for a given line of text in all files in the current directory tree older than 2 months without using pipes Reply 89 Avish Aren July 3, 2009

89 Avish Aren July 3, 2009 While looking in an application log file, you see a line to the effect of Cannot bind to address: 1.2.3.4 address already in use; what does this indicate? Reply 90 ant July 10, 2009 ps can also sort the output ps -eo pcpu,vsize,rss,pid,user,args sort -pcpu i am using this now in a monitoring script so as soon as something goes wrong i can get a snapshot of the cpu hog, and check up on process memory usage as well. Reply 91 Anurag Srivastav August 25, 2009 Your posting seems to be helpful. I suggest you to add some info about vmstat command Reply 92 Anbu September 16, 2009 Its a good article Reply 93 Anbu September 16, 2009 How to list the top by showing the cpu core details without pressing 1. Reply 94 anand November 10, 2009 Nice Article !! Can someone tell me how to find on which processor/core the process is attached ? Reply 95 Arun December 4, 2009 I have query here. Appreciate if any one could help me on this. My server is ProLiant DL380 G3 model which is a 32 bit CPU server. It has two cpus. Now the problem is server alsways showing high IOWAIT. CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle total 3.2% 0.0% 0.5% 0.0% 0.0% 95.7% 0.3% cpu00 1.1% 0.0% 0.7% 0.0% 0.0% 98.0% 0.0% cpu01 5.3% 0.0% 0.3% 0.0% 0.0% 93.4% 0.7% There is no process which is taking high CPU. All the process are looks normal. And the total cpu utilization also showing very less. Its started two month back and since then the server performance is too slow. Can any one help me on this please? Reply 96 Manoj Mukundan February 9, 2010 While using top press 1 can show load of each cpu(core) as shown below op 20:10:48 up 2 days, 1:30, 1 user, load average: 1.01, 1.01, 0.97 Tasks: 119 total, 2 running, 117 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu0 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.7% id, 0.3% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu1 : 99.7% us, 0.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu2 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu3 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu4 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu5 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu6 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu7 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 32905096k total, 20045912k used, 12859184k free, 264608k buffers Swap: 34812844k total, 0k used, 34812844k free, 5588896k cached Reply 97 Tech 2 February 10, 2010 Guys Please let me know When I give # mpstat -P ALL I can see 16 CPUs [0 to 15]. How Can I check How many physical CPUs are installed on server Reply 98 Oliver Kleinecke February 15, 2010 Hi Guys! Just wanted to offer you to email me, if you are having trouble to configure/monitor your system performance on linux.

Just wanted to offer you to email me, if you are having trouble to configure/monitor your system performance on linux. I am working as a gameserver admin, and I have been using a lot of different linux-versions, including SuSE, RedHat, Debian, Gentoo and some other Unix-like systems. As you can imagine, Realtime-Online-Gameservers are very dependent on a healthy and FAST system, where CPU,RAM & IO Usage is extremely important, because gameservers would lag otherwise.. During the past few years, I found out a lot of tricks, read hundreds of howtos, and compiled many many different kernels with custom features for a lot of different hardware, include 32bit-single-cpus, 64bit-multicore-cpus, ppc-architecture-systems and so on and so on.. So if you have got real trouble, which you can`t easily google yourself, let me know, I`ll be happy to help out.. Best regards, Oliver Reply 99 venkat September 17, 2010 Hi, i have a query regarding CPU utilization and CPU percentage. What is mean by CPU percentage? Basing on what parameter we can calculate CPU percentage. On my AIX server having 4 cpus shows below values for each 15 min interval. system cpu time is 4%, User cpu time is 90% idle cpu time is 6% and CPU percentage of all the processes not exceeded 20%. How can i understood my CPU performance from the above values. Reply 100 {A} February 18, 2010 4 c top 5 processes -> ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args sort=pcpu | tail -n 5 Reply 101 Craig March 8, 2010 When on a multicore system, does top with no arguments show an average of each core? I know that with the 1 argument I can see each CPU listed. But with no arguments what am I seeing? It appears to be an average of stats on each CPU? Thanks! Craig Reply 102 Ben Salem March 14, 2010 I lost my password Reply 103 Prashant March 17, 2010 Hi Oliver Kleinecke, I have e-commerce site. which is using two load balancer and 8 web servers. how can I monitor server performance of each machine or CPU. Thanks, Prashant Reply 104 moonpixel March 26, 2010 Thanks much for all this info, is it possible to get daily stats written into a log file? or do I need to get some script to do that? any recommendations? thank you MM Reply 105 Venkat April 24, 2010 Hi, Is there a way to find out cpu usage per thread in Linux? Some other threads say that we cannot find cpu usage at thread level in Linux? Is that true? Any material to give more insight on this topic. I know /proc//lpsinfo structure gives cpu usage per thread in Solaris. Appreciate your response, Thanks, Venkat Reply 106 Vivek Gite April 25, 2010 Use pidstat command. Reply 107 gustavx May 9, 2010

Here there is a piece of a script that may be useful to get the CPU usage only: top bd00.50n2 | grep Cpu | tail -n1 | sed s/.*Cpu(s)://g; s/us,.*//g This gives the User CPU usage, but could be easily modified for other values. Reply 108 Rey July 23, 2010 Is there anyway to determine CPU cycles currently in use and available CPU Cycles. Reply 109 Dawn Alphonse Jose October 18, 2010 how can i resolve this issue of CPU utilisation in my linux server. Reply 110 Sharad January 10, 2011 This helps, thanks! Reply 111 Mani January 26, 2011 Great article.. Also please consider mentioning about vmstat tool. It is another great tool.. Reply 112 Lohith March 22, 2011 Hi , I am running mpstat -P ALL command and calculating the CPU utilization values. but i want to calculate the cpu utilization values of another CPU from the one that I am working from and report the values of the same to other module that is working on in my processor ..Is it possible? Please let me know ..This is a urgent requirement.. Reply 113 Kilroy April 1, 2011 Great article!!! thanks although i have a debian squeeze box without X GUI installed although id like to have graphical reports on performance statistics like CPU%, memory usage etc.. is there any tool or command i can use to get this done? using systat i noticed im getting volumes of text data and its quite time consuming to search for specific data. im quite new to this could anyone help me out Thanks in advance Reply 114 Kilroy April 1, 2011 to be more specific i was using *sar and found all the data i wanted and more but realized that i needed more Graphical data. could anyone suggest which direction i need to move to get this done? Reply 115 Taher May 4, 2011 Is there a way for me to see sar results for yesterday from the default log? ( By default it only shows from midnight of today . Note: I am not explicitly running or saving it ) Thanks . Reply 116 RapidSpeeds May 7, 2011 Nice guide, very well written and documented. Will direct anyone here should any such questions arise from one of our customers. Thanks. Reply 117 sachin June 28, 2011 how to check cpu utilization past 2 days Please help me Reply 118 Si Em July 11, 2011 Could you kindly descripe more detail about the below command. For example, if use command number 2 nohup, what directory should i used? Local directory or server directory? Thank in advance for your kind. To get multiple samples and multiple reports set an output file for the sar command. Run the sar command as a background process using.

To get multiple samples and multiple reports set an output file for the sar command. Run the sar command as a background process using. # sar -o output.file 12 8 >/dev/null 2>&1 & Better use nohup command so that you can logout and check back report later on: # nohup sar -o output.file 12 8 >/dev/null 2>&1 & All data is captured in binary form and saved to a file (data.file). The data can then be selectively displayed ith the sar command using the -f option. # sar -f data.file Reply 119 Roel July 27, 2011 Nice article this helped, thanks. Reply Leave a Comment Name * E-mail * Website

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