[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana CPU Usage.

[Michael Schuster]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 06:52, Nicholas Metsovon <nmetsovo at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I've been running Linux for more than ten years, but I'm pretty new to
> OpenSolaris.
>
>
> We want to put up a new website for videos, and we'd like a rock-solid stable
> system, so I've been looking at OpenSolaris - and primarily OpenIndiana.
>
> We have a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with eight processing cores and 16GB Ram for this
> project.
>
>
> My question is this:
>
> When I have Linux loaded on this system, and I do a "top" command, it shows
> something like 99.3% idle most of the time.
>
> When I have OpenIndiana, OpenSolaris, or Nexenta Core 3.0 on it, it shows more
> like 80% idle, with the majority of the remaining 20% listed as "kernel".
>
> Is it normal for OpenSolaris to take up so much of the CPU just to run, compared
> to Linux?

can't comment on Linux, but a few points about Solaris:
- does what you see persist over time (minutes)?
- prstat may show a different picture
- prstat -m shows per-process microstate accounting, this may
enlighten you about what's triggering the load (if it persists)
- have a go at DTrace, something like
  # dtrace -n 'profile-10ms{@[stack()] = count()}'
  interrupted after a few seconds will show you what the kernel's
doing most of the time

HTH
-- 
regards/mit freundlichen Grüssen
Michael Schuster