CPUΒΆ

The CPU stats are shown as a percentage or value and for the configured refresh time. The total CPU usage is displayed on the first line.

../_images/cpu.png

If enough horizontal space is available, extended CPU information are displayed.

../_images/cpu-wide.png

CPU stats description:

  • user: percent time spent in user space
  • system: percent time spent in kernel space
  • idle: percent of CPU used by any program
  • nice: percent time occupied by user level processes with a positive nice value
  • irq: percent time spent servicing/handling hardware/software interrupts
  • iowait: percent time spent in wait (on disk)
  • steal: percent time in involuntary wait by virtual cpu while hypervisor is servicing another processor/virtual machine
  • ctx_sw: number of context switches (voluntary + involuntary) per second
  • inter: number of interrupts per second
  • sw_inter: number of software interrupts per second. Always set to 0 on Windows and SunOS.
  • syscal: number of system calls per second. Do not displayed on Linux (always 0).

To switch to per-CPU stats, just hit the 1 key:

../_images/per-cpu.png

By default, steal CPU time alerts aren’t logged. If you want that, just add to the configuration file:

[cpu]
steal_log=True

Legend:

CPU (user/system) Status
<50% OK
>50% CAREFUL
>70% WARNING
>90% CRITICAL

Note

Limit values can be overwritten in the configuration file under the [cpu] and/or [percpu] sections.