TOP

[Mary Ann Lipa]

Please help me explain 'top' output to my manager =(

CPU TTY USERNAME STATE COMMAND
1 ? root sleep diagmond
1 ? root run vxfsd
0 ? root run _progress
0 ? user1 run sh

how do i explain all the lines?

help please.....

Thanks!!

[Michael Tully]

A process that states 'run' means it being issued cpu time, at the point that you see it on the monitor.
A process that states 'sleep' means it is not being issued cpu time, at the point that you see it on the monitor.
The CPU column is the CPU assigned to that process. You can also see from the top screen how cpu has been consumed from the time column.

[Michael Tully]

One thing that I forgot to mention, was there is man page that covers most if not all of this information.

$ man top

[Mary Ann Lipa]

what about the TTY '?' value...
does it mean the process has hung?
or the process running on the background?
i know sh should have a valid tty.. am i right

thanks for the help guys...
need more... =)

[Con O'Kelly]

Hi

No it doesn't necessarily mean the process has hung. TTY just shows which terminal the process is attached to (if any). "?" means that it is not attached to any terminal which will be normal for alot of processes. But yes I think sh should be attached to a terminal.

Cheers
Con

[Michael Tully · Accepted solution]

The '?' indicates that the process is in the background. It could also be a runaway process as well. These are generally described as 'zombies' where a process has detached itself from it's parent. The process priority for these will be 200 + in the PRI column. You can gather further information about these processes by running the 'ps' command.

$ ps -fp

If you are unsure, please post the output of this, so we can try to assist/explain further.

$ top -f /tmp/top.out