2 CPU percentage is calculated as a fraction of total available computing
3 resources. Hence on a multiprocessor machine a single threaded process
4 can never consume cpu time in excess of 1 divided by the number of processors.
5 For example, on a 4 processor machine, a single threaded process will
6 never show a cpu percentage higher than 25%. The CPU percentage column
7 will always total approximately 100, regardless of the number of processors.
9 The kernel summary line shows the following information, all displayed
22 Number of system calls.
25 Number of forks and vforks.
28 Number of page faults.
31 Number of kilobytes paged in to physical memory.
34 Number of kilobytes paged out from physical memory.
36 The memory summary line displays the following:
39 Total amount of physical memory that can be allocated for use by processes
40 (it does not include memory reserved for the kernel's use).
43 The amount of unallocated physical memory.
46 The total amount of swap area allocated on disk.
49 The amount of swap area on disk that is still available.
51 Unlike previous versions of
53 the swap figures will differ from the summary output of
55 since the latter includes physical memory as well.
59 indicates the number of lightweight processes in a process.
60 This usually corresponds to the number of threads in that process.
62 The display of individual threads can be toggled with the
67 Information about state, priority, CPU time and percent CPU are
68 shown for each individual thread. Other information is identical
69 for all threads in the same process. In this display the column
73 and shows the lightweight process id. The
81 In BSD Unix, process priority was represented internally as a signed
82 offset from a zero value with an unsigned value. The "zero" value
83 was usually something like 20, allowing for a range of priorities
84 from -20 to 20. As implemented on SunOS 5, older versions of top
85 continued to interpret process priority in this manner, even though
86 it was no longer correct. Starting with top version 3.5, this was
87 changed to agree with the rest of the system.
89 Long options are not currently available in Solaris.
91 The SunOS 5 (Solaris 2) port was originally written by Torsten Kasch,
92 <torsten@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>. Many contributions have been
93 provided by Casper Dik <Casper.Dik@sun.com>.
94 Support for multi-cpu, calculation of CPU% and memory stats provided by
95 Robert Boucher <boucher@sofkin.ca>, Marc Cohen <marc@aai.com>,
96 Charles Hedrick <hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu>, and
97 William L. Jones <jones@chpc>.