This is the most interactive way to see CPU usage.Obtaining the load average of your server(s) will shed some light on the system’s CPU usage over time. User mmouse is at the top of the list, and the 'TIME' column shows that the program desert.exe has used 292 minutes and 20 seconds of CPU time. In this example, the 'TIME' column shows that the process running Elm has used 22 CPU seconds.

At the Unix prompt, enter: ps -u username The output will appear in a slightly different format when using sh, ksh, or bash, since the time command is not built into those shells. The percentage (29.0%) indicates the percentage of the CPU's time that the process used while it ran. The sum of the user and system times is the total CPU time of the process. The program myprog used 1.406 seconds of user time, 0.042 seconds of system time, and 4.96 seconds of real time. The following is an output example for users in the csh or tcsh shells: 1.406u 0.042s 0:04.96 29.0% 2+5k 0+1io 0pf+0w Replace myprog with the name of the program you are running. If you want to see a grand total of CPU time for a program when it finishes running, you can use the time command. In Unix, you can see CPU usage on a job that is running in a number of ways, as described below: The time command

For more information about the nice command, at the Unix prompt, enter: man nice If you are concerned about slowing the system down, you can use the nice command to lower your program's priority.

Linux cpu load