Re: TOP interpretation

Ah, you've found a RTFM escape clause -- or at least a hall pass. :P

If you're really stuck, however, there are tons and tons of webpages
dedicated to manpages.  There is also Google to help you, too.

Funny thing, though:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=296471

It seems the section you are looking for, is hard to find in several
distros.  One of my Debian boxes is missing section 2c, and it looks like
several Redhat (and therefore CentOS) is too.

Check this page, with section 2c in it:

http://www.annodex.net/cgi-bin/man/man2html?1+top

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:29:49 -0400
OddSox <[email protected]> wrote:

> I don't know whether I should top or bottom post at this point.
> 
> I had sent an earlier post where I tried "man top" and got crap that  
> I couldn't read because of encoding issues, so I posted the later  
> message. Perhaps the earlier one didn't make it to the list?
> 
> > How do I fix this crap?
> >
> > -bash-3.2$ man top - results in gibberish like...
> >
> >      13        The traditional switches ?<80><99>-?<80><99> and  
> > whitespace are optional.
> >
> > This particular box is a CentOS 5.x server, although I've had the  
> > same thing happen on many different systems for years and I'm  
> > getting tired of it. Asking for "man" on just about anything  
> > results in unreadable stuff related to unicode or something. I only  
> > use terminal so there must be some setting I can hit for this?
> >
> > Is it because I'm using bash?
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 26, 2009, at 12:51 PM, Brad Barnett wrote:
> 
> >
> > man 'top' should help you, Oddsox.
> >
> > It will clarify much below, and correct the "wait" statement below.
> >
> > That is:
> >
> >         wa  --  iowait
> >           Amount of time the CPU has been waiting for I/O to complete.
> >
> > See more info in the docs, or put another way ... RTFM :P
> >
> > On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:33:10 -0400
> > Damian Gerow <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> OddSox wrote:
> >> : Further to my last message, I'm trying to figure out the
> >> significance : of the various CPU numbers in TOP on my CentOS 5.x
> >> server... :
> >> : > Cpu(s):  0.3%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.7%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,
> >> 0.0%si,  0.0%st :
> >> :
> >> : What does 99.7%id mean?
> >>
> >> %us = user
> >> %sy = system
> >> %ni = nice
> >> %id = idle
> >> %wa = wait
> >> %hi = ?
> >> %si = system interrupts?
> >> %st = ?
> >>
> >> I've never seen those last three, but it's been a few years since I
> >> bothered with 'top' in Linux.  System performance is a notoriously
> >> difficult thing to measure and understand...
> >>
> >> user = amount of time the system is running userland code
> >> system = amount of time the system is running kernel code
> >> nice = I've never really understood this one
> >> idle = amount of time the system is doing nothing
> >> wait = amount of time the system is waiting for available CPU cycles
> >>
> >> Or something like that.
> >> -- 
> >> OCLUG general discussion list
> >> [email protected]
> >> http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug
> > -- 
> > OCLUG general discussion list
> > [email protected]
> > http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug
> 
> -- 
> OCLUG general discussion list
> [email protected]
> http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug
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