[Toybox] CPU always maxed in top

[Rob Landley]

On 6/5/19 5:26 AM, makepost wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 03:34:02AM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
>> 400%cpu  22%user   0%nice   9%sys 370%idle   0%iow   0%irq   0%sirq   0%host
>> The 400% cpu means it's a 4x SMP system, that's the total available CPU.
>>
>> 370% idle means 30% of one CPU is used (22% user and 9% sys, mostly chromium
>> background noise), and the remaining 3 and 3/4 processor time is idle.
> 
> Sorry. I didn't immediately remember this was intentional.

I could change it to say 4xSMP perhaps?

I could also have it display 400-idle, but the reason I didn't do that is if you
sit down at a machine you're unfamiliar with you don't immediateley know what
the numbers mean without the reference.

Sigh. The htop bar graph (or text equivalent, ala CPU:100  37 100  0) gives you
the actual info.

(Cosmetic issues are _hard_. There isn't a right answer, or at least no
empirical test for one.)

> Had a busybox
> window aside, and it got no total field for CPU count, starts with user
> percentage. Toybox differing in that it lets 100% represent one core
> rather than all CPUs, across all fields, was clear from the varying 370%
> in idle, so the total may be unnecessary:

It was clear in your use case, on a machine you were already familiar with.

The individual processes go from 0-100% of a processor, I.E. 0-100% of what a
single process (thread) can use. Then the numbers up top are what you get if you
add those up, I.E. are in the same scale as the numbers below. But the numbers
up top aren't describing a process, they're describing the machine. 100% of the
machine is tough to describe with SMP (hyper-threading, burst mode, etc. And
don't get me started on cache local vs memory bus limited...)

>> 400%cpu  22%user   0%nice   9%sys 370%idle   0%iow   0%irq   0%sirq   0%host
>>                                    ^ ^ ^
> 
> But some redundancy is okay, just got confused. Never mind.

It's a useful data point. It needs to be improved. It's on the todo list.

Rob