When running a simple top command, you notice that while running nothing else, the User role may consume 7% of the droplet. Idle fluctuates between 92%-88%. However, when looking at the DigitalOcean dashboard I noticed that during those same instances, the droplet’s ‘CPU Usage’ statistic barely reached 1%.
I’m curious about the ‘CPU Usage’ stat in general. If an idle reading is 0% while the DigitalOcean ‘CPU Usage’ stat shows maybe 1%- does that mean that 100% of the CPU was dedicated to a task at that moment, but during that moment the CPU itself was only taxed at 1% of its total capability??
Trying to wrap my head around monitoring and system health. Thank you!!
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Accepted Answer
Hi there,
Idle means that the CPU is not doing any work, for example, if the CPU is Idle at 95% then the usage is actually 5%.
I could suggest running the htop command on your server as you will get a better visual representation of the CPU utilization.
The top command shows you the load average of your CPUs. For example, roughly speaking, if you have 1 CPU, then 100% CPU usage would be represented as 1. The load average would match the Load (1/5/15) graph in your DigitalOcean metrics.
Hope that this helps. Regards, Bobby
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