views:

75

answers:

3

Out of curiosity ... is it possible to have more than 100% utilization of the CPU in a multi-threaded environment?

+5  A: 

Hi

No, of course not. And any utility which tells you otherwise is lying.

Regards

Mark

High Performance Mark
+1 I got delayed by the "'No' isn't a long enough answer" error...
David Oneill
@David, you need to keep your finger on the trigger a bit longerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr :-)
High Performance Mark
A: 

No, this could never happen by definition of cpu utilization. What you may see is the number of runnable processes greater than the number of cpus. This is normal in a multithreaded environment as the scheduler schedules on the thread level instaed of the process level.

ennuikiller
+3  A: 

a single CPU core can not be at more than 100% utilization. But on a multi core system most utilities report the sum of the CPU utilization thus numbers above 100% are quite common.

Gareth Davis
True. `top` can show more than 100% for a multithreaded application
skwllsp