Re: Output of "top" - CPU% weirdness?

["Oliver J. Morais" <oliver_(_dot_)_morais_(_at_)_gmail_(_dot_)_com>]

* Arnaud Bergeron <abergeron_(_at_)_gmail_(_dot_)_com> [050703 03:09]:
> All it takes to find that out is a little bit of observation and
> deduction.  From the second output you provided you should see md5's
> CPU usage go up rapidly.

No. md5's CPU doesn't go up. If I try "john -t" it slowly goes up.

Let's stick with "john -t" 'cause it's real CPU hog.

top(1) output show a CPU-Usage going up slowly, showing different numbers
than ps(1).

load averages:  1.80,  1.15,  0.68                                            09:25:13
51 processes:  1 running, 49 idle, 1 on processor
CPU states: 97.0% user,  0.0% nice,  2.5% system,  0.5% interrupt,  0.0% idle
Memory: Real: 45M/116M act/tot  Free: 374M  Swap: 0K/1024M used/tot

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE    WAIT     TIME    CPU COMMAND
 7399 moo       64    0 3208K  952K run      -        0:10 36.47% john
13289 moo        2    0   18M   22M sleep    select   0:21  0.05% Xorg
16577 moo        2    0 2924K 3588K sleep    select   0:08  0.00% xterm
13376 moo       10    0 4332K 2832K idle     wait     0:00  0.00% mutt
26326 moo        2    0 3000K 3600K sleep    select   0:00  0.00% xterm

$ while true; do ps -ax -opcpu -ocommand | grep john | grep -v grep ; sleep 1; done 
45.0 john -t
71.8 john -t
80.9 john -t
85.0 john -t
87.8 john -t
89.6 john -t
90.7 john -t
91.7 john -t
92.1 john -t
92.6 john -t
93.1 john -t
93.5 john -t
93.9 john -t

And these numbers were taken parallel in two xterm, so 36.47%
from top(1) showed up wile ps(1) was reporting 90+ percent CPU.

>   Now, if you're not happy with that, you're
> welcome to fix it yourself

As always... Too bad I'm not a developer.