There are a few more tools we can use to check CPU usage, and they’re contained in the sysstat package. Below that, there’s a list of running processes and a column titled %CPU, which contains the current CPU usage of each process listed. The next two lines are dedicated to memory information, and aren’t relevant for monitoring CPU usage. Example: the CPU needed to “steal” resources from a virtual machine in order to process the physical machine’s workload.

st: Percentage of CPU time that was stolen from a virtual machine.

Example: a high priority service interrupting the CPU.

si: Percentage of CPU time spent processing software interrupts.

Example: the network card (or any piece of hardware) interrupting the CPU to notify it that new data has arrived.

hi: Percentage of CPU time spent processing hardware interrupts.

Example: waiting for a hard drive to finish reading data.

wa: Percentage of CPU time spent on waiting on I/O from hardware.

ni: Percentage of CPU time spent on running processes with a user-defined priority (a specified nice value).

sy: Percentage of CPU time spent in kernel space (running system processes).

us: Percentage of CPU time spent in user space (running user-spawned processes).

This will open up a display in the terminal that has a live view of services running on the system, the amount of system resources each of those services are using, as well as a summary of the system’s CPU utilization, among other information. A lot of the output from this command is rather complex, but it gives very granular information about how the CPU is being utilized on a system. $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged userĪ great way to check the current CPU usage is with the top command.

# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used How to Check and Monitor CPU utilization on Linux Software Requirements and Conventions Used Software Requirements and Linux Command Line Conventions Category

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