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Irix Mode vs. Solaris Mode in Top Command

On Solaris, the top command always takes all cpu usage as a maximum 100%, no matter how many cpus are there on the board. In a case of 4 processors on a server, any single process listed on top command will not exceed 25% of overall cpu usage. This is the well-known "Solaris Mode". The rationale can found in the manual of top command on Solaris:

SUNOS 57 NOTES
     CPU percentage is calculated as a fraction of  total  available computing resources.  Hence on a multiprocessor machine a single threaded process can  never  consume  cpu  time  in excess  of 1 divided by the number of processors.  For example, on a 4 processor machine,  a  single  threaded  process will  never  show a cpu percentage higher than 25%.  The CPU percentage  column  will  always  total  approximately 100, regardless of the number of processors.

Which means, Solaris takes all the processors as a whole, the total usage of cpu is always from 0% to 100%, regardless how many processors the server has. That is, if a Solaris server with N processors, a single process can only consume the overall cpu usage up to (100/N)%.

The feature of Solaris Mode has been adopted on Linux, the opposite concept is called Irix Mode, which is the default mode on Linux, and can be switched on and off. When Irix Mode is on, the maximum total cpu usage are the summation of total number of cpu, no more fixed at 1 (100%) as Solaris mode. Hence, a single process can be up to 100% when Irix Mode is on.

Let's see an example on a Linux server with 4 processors:

$ top

top - 19:53:18 up  5:03,  2 users,  load average: 0.74, 0.47, 0.19
Tasks:  85 total,   2 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 11.8% us, 22.5% sy,  0.0% ni, 63.9% id,  0.1% wa,  1.7% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   4147376k total,   658276k used,  3489100k free,    52380k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   496740k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 5330 oracle    16   0 14456 5944 3936 S   71  0.1   3:04.48 sqlplus
 5269 root      16   0  7708 2304 1832 R   53  0.1   2:07.39 sshd
 5355 oracle    17   0  308m  61m  49m S   17  1.5   0:39.94 oracle
...

Since the default mode of Linux is Irix Mode, any single process can consume up to 100% of one processor. In the above example, the first process takes 71% on cpu usage.

Let's switch to Solaris Mode before the process disappears by pressing I on the keyboard.

top - 19:54:59 up  5:05,  2 users,  load average: 0.51, 0.44, 0.20
Tasks:  85 total,   4 running,  81 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 10.2% us, 23.8% sy,  0.0% ni, 64.4% id,  0.0% wa,  1.5% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   4147376k total,   658340k used,  3489036k free,    52440k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   496680k cached
 Irix mode Off
  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 5330 oracle    16   0 14456 5944 3936 R   18  0.1   3:17.43 sqlplus
 5269 root      16   0  7708 2304 1832 R   13  0.1   2:17.35 sshd
 5355 oracle    16   0  308m  61m  49m S    4  1.5   0:43.52 oracle
 7871 oracle    16   0  3848  996  776 R    0  0.0   0:00.13 top
...

Cpu usage of the first process drops from 71% to 18% under Solaris Mode, which is no more than (100/4)% = 25%.

A final note, it's impossible for any single process to utilize more than one processor at the same time. If you want database operations to utilize more processors, you should try "degree of parallel" on the database-level or "multi-thread" on the application-level.

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