How can I determine which processes are using up the most CPU?

Posted by Rob on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Rob
Published on 2010-04-25T01:57:27Z Indexed on 2010/04/25 2:04 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 633

Filed under:

load-average

|

cpu

|

cpu-usage

|

cpu-hogging

05:54:17 up 6 days, 9:54, 1 user, load average: 15.70, 8.04, 4.56

Load average is a LOT higher than it should be. It was HALF of that a moment ago, I used ps aux to see which processes were using a lot of cpu, and the httpd was using a TON. It had several processes running with 0.9 each. So I restarted the httpd, and now those processes are gone, but the load averages have doubled.

So my question is: is there a way I can list the processes that are consuming the most cpu?

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about load-average

Load Average runaway

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Is there any way to chase down lockups and runaway load averages? Every so often (pretty randomly) I'll get my load average spike up over 5 usually to around 10-15 and sometimes as high as 75 (dual core machine), and cause my system to lock for an indeterminate amount of time. The only thing I can… >>> More
raid 1 and high load average

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
i have a server with high load average, I think the problem is the raid 1. cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md0 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0] 256896 blocks [2/2] [UU] md3 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0] 2562240 blocks [2/2] [UU] md4 : active raid1 sdb5[1] sda5[0] … >>> More
Apache jamming at low load average

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Apache seems to stop responding sometimes even though apache processes are still running. After restarting apache, the load average usually shoots up from 1 - 2 to 13 - 15 in a matter of seconds. What would the cause of this be, or how could I find out why apache stops serving? My httpd.conf is: <IfModule… >>> More
Server load average over an arbitrary period of time

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
top and uptime get me the server load average for the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes but is there an easy way to get the average load of yesterday or any other day for that matter? >>> More
4.5 Load average on single CPU

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I'm currently looking at... top - 16:27:37 up 27 min, 1 user, load average: 4.96, 3.75, 2.87 Tasks: 141 total, 6 running, 135 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 91.4%us, 6.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 1.3%si, 0.0%st Mem: 514952k total, 507500k used, 7452k free… >>> More

Related posts about cpu

Speedstep and Intel x5570?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hi, My new server has 2 x X5570 CPUs. Now here is the output of grep -i hz /proc/cpuinfo model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz cpu MHz : 1600.231 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5570 @ 2.93GHz cpu MHz : 1600.231 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU … >>> More
VMware ESXi - varying CPU time (CPU reservation)

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hello! I'm running FreeBSD 7.2 under VMware ESXi 3.5. Host has 2 physical CPUs and the BSD box is currently the only running VM. Only one virtual CPU is assigned to the VM. When measuring CPU time of a specific program, I get very different results from time to time. Processor usage is reported… >>> More
How to calculate CPU % based on raw CPU ticks in SNMP

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
According to http://net-snmp.sourceforge.net/docs/mibs/ucdavis.html#scalar_notcurrent ssCpuUser, ssCpuSystem, ssCpuIdle, etc are deprecated in favor of the raw variants (ssCpuRawUser, etc). The former values (which don't cover things like nice, wait, kernel, interrupt, etc) returned a percentage… >>> More
disparity between `top`'s given CPU % and process CPU usage total

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I've noticed that there are sometimes (large) differences between the reported total CPU usage and a summation of the per-process CPU utilization given by apps like top and wmtop. As an example: I recently ran a git filter-branch --index-filter on a fairly large repo, with the index-filter command… >>> More
How to read oom-killer syslog messages?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have a Ubuntu 12.04 server which sometimes dies completely - no SSH, no ping, nothing until it is physically rebooted. After the reboot, I see in syslog that the oom-killer killed, well, pretty much everything. There's a lot of detailed memory usage information in them. How do I read these logs… >>> More