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SUNOS 5 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.

The memory summary line displays the following: "phys mem" is the total amount of physical memory that can be allocated for use by processes (it does not include memory reserved for the kernel's use), "free mem" is the amount of unallocated physical memory, "total swap" is the amount of swap area on disk that is being used, "free swap" is the amount of swap area on disk that is still available. Unlike previous versions of pg_top, The swap figures will differ from the summary output of swap (1M) since the latter includes physical memory as well.

The column "THR" indicates the number of execution threads in the process.

In BSD Unix, process priority was represented internally as a signed offset from a zero value with an unsigned value. The "zero" value was usually something like 20, allowing for a range of priorities from -20 to 20. As implemented on SunOS 5, older versions of top continued to interpret process priority in this manner, even though it was no longer correct. Starting with top version 3.5, this was changed to agree with the rest of the system.

The SunOS 5 (Solaris 2) port was originally written by Torsten Kasch, <torsten@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de>. Many contributions have been provided by Casper Dik <Casper.Dik@sun.com>. Support for multi-cpu, calculation of CPU% and memory stats provided by Robert Boucher <boucher@sofkin.ca>, Marc Cohen <marc@aai.com>, Charles Hedrick <hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu>, and William L. Jones <jones@chpc>.