What is NICE?

[Geroge_2]

Hi,
I cant get this right.
15:08:11 up 7 days, 44 min, 5 users, load average: 0.02, 1.33, 7.14
73 processes: 71 sleeping, 1 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 0.0% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 100.0% idle
CPU1 states: 0.0% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 100.0% idle
CPU2 states: 0.2% user 3.4% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 95.4% idle
CPU3 states: 0.0% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 100.0% idle


What is nice? and how dose it add up?

[Marvin Strong]

Nice is a process state. you have no processes spending time in the nice state therefore its percentage is zero.

The percentages are those of time spent in each of the processor states.

All of the states together for each CPU should add up close to 100%

[Geroge_2]

Ok, then in this case:

15:22:26 up 7 days, 58 min, 5 users, load average: 10.43, 2.42, 3.60
120 processes: 116 sleeping, 3 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 47.1% user 5.4% system 47.0% nice 0.0% iowait 46.4% idle
CPU1 states: 39.2% user 5.3% system 39.2% nice 0.0% iowait 54.2% idle
CPU2 states: 48.1% user 3.4% system 48.1% nice 0.0% iowait 47.3% idle
CPU3 states: 40.3% user 3.4% system 40.1% nice 0.0% iowait 55.2% idle
Mem: 3882844k av, 3770196k used, 112648k free, 0k shrd, 21896k buff


what does the 47.0% on CPU one mean?

[James A. Donovan · Accepted solution]

It means you have one, or more, process which is running in a "nice" state and using 47% of available CPU power.

$ man nice
nice(1)

NAME
nice - run a command at nondefault priority

SYNOPSIS
nice [-priority_change] command [command_args]

nice [-n priority_change] command [command_args]

DESCRIPTION
The nice command executes command at a nondefault CPU scheduling priority. (The name is derived from being "nice" to other system users by running large programs at lower priority.)