Wednesday, March 25, 2009

cpu states in top and %st (steal)

top on ec2 machines looks like so
Cpu(s): 19.2%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 49.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 30.1%st

Most of these fields are fairly well documented:
us -> User
sy -> system
ni -> nice
id -> idle
wa -> iowait
hi -> H/w interrupt requests
si -> S/w interrupt requests

The final field, st, is "extra", implemented on virtualized machines.
The best explanation of it I was able to find was here:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/LinuxP/Measuring+stolen+CPU+cycles
%steal
Show the percentage of time spent in involuntary wait by the
virtual CPU or CPUs while the hypervisor was servicing another
virtual processor.

AFAICT, it appears that this doesn't necessarily mean that "some other
user" is stealing cpu resources from you; it could be the servicing of
one of the virtualized resources that is being consumed; if that
utilization is not tied back to your user correctly, it would show up
there.

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