I'm watching the emerge of mozilla-firefox with top (I've just set the java USE flag so that I can use some astronomy Web sites), and I'm puzzled. This is a dual-Opteron box with 4G memory, and I have it set up with 6G /tmp mounted on tmpfs. Top shows 0k of used swap, so I'm confident that I'm not doing any swapping. It should show me a total of up to 200% when the system is fully loaded.
But top shows 49 - 50% wa, which I understand is I/O waiting time (even with the X term rolled up), cc1plus is showing only single-digit percent CPU, and the System and User CPU % are in the teens. I can get X to use 30-odd % by leaving the terminal on display, or 1% by rolling it up; that seems not to affect the other figures. No other user processes are running; only the background processes started by init and so on. What is the machine doing? Why does it not work harder at its allotted task? -- Rgds Peter -- [email protected] mailing list
