I have finally found the answer myself: us = user sy = system ni = nice id = idle (these I knew already) wa = iowait hi = irq si = softirq I have a related question. Since I have started using soft RAID (two SATA drives, one partition striping (32kb chunk) and one partition mirroring) my iowait often goes up to 20% or more! On a 2GHz Opteron that is quite a lot. Does anyone have a suggestion how to minimize iowait? Is there anything I can tweak, like memory buffers, etc. to decrease iowait? Even though I use an Opteron processor I know it may not be the best list to ask that question. :) Sorry if I am off-topic. -m Marcin Zalewski wrote:
Hello list,
I have been trying to figure out what does the cpu usage output from top mean. I get: Cpu(s): 24.8% us, 11.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 55.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 8.9% si but I cannot figure out what does "wa", "hi", and "si" stand for. Can anybody help?
Thanks.
-m