What Do Top %Cpu Abbreviations Mean?
Does Anyone Know What the 2-Letter Abbreviations Mean in the %Cpu Line in the Header Above the Top Table of Processes? Here's a Sample Output from Running Top...
Does anyone know what the 2-letter abbreviations mean in the %CPU line in the header above the top table of processes? Here's a sample output from running top.
top - 15:10:34 up 8 days, 5:11, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 3.80, 26.82
Tasks: 1 total, 0 running, 1 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.3 us, 0.7 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.0 id, 1.1 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 2051456 total, 623544 used, 1427912 free, 1292 buffers
KiB Swap: 3203068 total, 147188 used, 3055880 free, 38352 cached
Here are my guesses and the ones I don't know.
us = user
sy = system
ni = ?
id = idle?
wa = ?
hi = ?
si = ?
st = ?
1 Answer
In "top" what are us, sy, ni, id, wa, hi, si and st (for CPU usage)?
us- user cpu time (or) % CPU time spent in user spacesy- system cpu time (or) % CPU time spent in kernel spaceni- user nice cpu time (or) % CPU time spent on low priority processesid- idle cpu time (or) % CPU time spent idlewa- io wait cpu time (or) % CPU time spent in wait (on disk)hi- hardware irq (or) % CPU time spent servicing/handling hardware interruptssi- software irq (or) % CPU time spent servicing/handling software interruptsst- steal time % CPU time in involuntary wait by virtual cpu while hypervisor is servicing another processor (or) % CPU time stolen from a virtual machine
Source: In Linux "top" command what are us, sy, ni, id, wa, hi, si and st (for CPU usage)?
Marcus Vance is a cybersecurity auditor and technology writer dedicated to educating the public about online safety, data privacy regulations, enterprise security, and emerging cyber threats.
