There's also loadavg. I've encountered a lot of people who think that a high loadavg MUST imply a lot of CPU use. Not on Linux, at least: > The first three fie

There's also loadavg. I've encountered a lot of people who think that a high loadavg MUST imply a lot of CPU use. Not on Linux, at least: > The first three fields in this file are load average figures giving the number of jobs in the run queue (state R) or waiting for disk I/O (state D) averaged over 1, 5, and 15 minutes. Nobody knows about the "or waiting for disk I/O (state D)" bit. So a bunch of processes doing disk I/O can cause loadavg spikes, but there can still be plenty of spare CPU.