On Fri, Mar 15 2002 at 21:33:32 -0800, paul beard wrote:
> Subject is terse . . . . my question is why my box is spending so 
> much time in system on big compiles (mozilla, frinstance)? I am 
> used to seeing lots of system time in use with lots of swapping, 
> but in this case there isn't any swap in use.
> 
> sorry for the munged output: it's also attaches if that helps.
It does, thanks.

> from the looks of things, I have lots of swapping (that's how I 
> read context switches) and perhaps I just have brutally slow 
No, a context switch is when a multitasking kernel stops executing one
process and starts/continues processing another.

> disks. The only thing happening right now is a big rm job and I 
> didn't think that would be a real taxing job.

>  procs   memory     page                       disks         faults      cpu
>  r b w   avm   fre  flt  re  pi   po   fr   sr s0 c0 s1 m0   in   sy  cs us sy id
>  0 1 0 13124 38204   48   0   0    0    0    0  2  0  6  0  152 3660  17  4  7 89
>  0 1 0 13128 38200   34   0   0    0    0    0 79  0  0  0  569  273  81  0  2 98
>  0 1 0 13128 38200   34   0   0    0    0    0 83  0  0  0  586  320  84  0  1 99
>  0 1 0 13128 38200   34   0   0    0    0    0 82  0  0  0  592  289  83  0  1 99
>  0 1 0 14164 36976  153   0   0    0    0    0 61  0  0  0  515  443  80  1  9 89
>  0 1 0 13128 37676   34   0   0    0    0    0 79  0  0  0  586  292  84  0  2 98
                                                                           ^^^^^^^^
The last three numbers are about CPU utilization, so you have 0-1% user
time, 2-9% system time and 89-99% of its time the CPU was idle
(see manpage of vmstat for the other numbers). In my eyes pretty normal
numbers for the task you are describing.

Where do you see >60% system time?

-- 
Dies ist Thilos Unix Signature! Viel Spass damit.