What does the CPU Usage in the Webinterface mean?

If your CPU is at 100% all the time, it means you have a broken or runaway process somewhere.

Run the top command from the commandline (press 'q' to quit it). Top will display the programs (processes) running on your system and will sort it from highest to lowest CPU usage.

Unix processes are normally very lightweight and should (when idle) not take up more than a few percent. If you have one sitting at 90%+ and is idle, then it needs to be investigated.

–deckert

/me hopes he doesn't share a CPU with cattani :wink:

thanks! but i asked, because i dont get the difference between top showing me my machine is 100-99,5% idle, but the graph in the linode webinterface always shows around 100%.. heres the graph:

![](

http://www.yourfilehost.com/media.php?c … aph.sh.png">http://www.yourfilehost.com/media.php?cat=image&file=generate_graph.sh.png " />

and thats what top says:

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

17551 nrmaluser 20 0 2268 992 784 R 0.3 0.3 0:00.35 top

1 root 20 0 2108 580 504 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.74 init

2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd

3 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0

4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 events/0

5 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper

43 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 kblockd/0

60 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 pdflush

61 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.07 pdflush

62 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.19 kswapd0

63 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0

71 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jfsIO

72 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jfsCommit

73 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 jfsSync

74 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 xfslogd/0

75 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 xfsdatad/0

76 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 xfsmrucache

Hmmm, that's interresting.

1. What kernel version are you on? (uname -a)

2. What is the contents of /proc/loadavg? (cat /proc/loadavg)

–deckert

loadavg:

0.00 0.00 0.00 1/98 18827

uname -a:

Linux lix-y 2.6.23.1-linode36 #1 Sun Nov 4 12:03:06 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

cattani, open a support ticket with the Linode guys - this is not normal.

–deckert

support ticket helped :-)

"CPU usage shown on the dashboard is a sum of all processes running with your username on the host. In this case a LISH instance didn't get terminated when you disconnected and was spinning."

support killed the insctance, now cpu usage is at zero