sy: Time spent in kernel space (e.g., processing kernel, extensions, drivers, etc).

us: Time spent in user space (e.g., processing user-spawned apps/programs).

Here’s a breakdown of what the abbreviations mean: The next bit to pay attention to is the %Cpu(s) row. Numbers over 1.0 indicate that the CPU is being overloaded. That’s because top is reporting on how much load the CPU is trying to process. Keep in mind that sometimes these load averages can exceed 1.0 (100%). In our case, we have 3% CPU usage over the last minute, 21% usage averaged over the last 5 minutes, and 16% usage averaged over the last 15 minutes. The numbers represent percentages, so 0.5 would be 50% and 1.0 would be 100%. These numbers are the load average of our CPU over the last 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes, respectively. On our system, we have: load average: 0.03, 0.21, 0.16 To exit from top, just press q.Īt the top of the top output, you will also find the system’s load average. Use key t to cycle through different views offered by top.

You can see in our screenshot that gnome-shell is using the most resources on our system, at 7.6% CPU usage. Look for the %CPU column to see how many CPU resources each process is consuming.

It gives us a basic overview of the apps and services running on our system, and sorts them by their CPU usage. The top command is installed by default on all Linux desktops and servers. In this tutorial, you will learn how to monitor your Linux system’s CPU usage. Your Linux operating system will make a determination on how to divide its CPU resources across all of the various programs that are competing to use it. All applications and system services will need to utilize the CPU in order to run. The CPU is the most important component of your computer.

Linux monitor cpu usage