What units of time does “top” use

mantimetop

If I issue the "top" command and receive results such as:

PID   USER  PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND   
00001 bob   25   0 77380 1212 1200 R 95.8  0.0  89122:13 fee         
00002 bob   25   0 77380 1196 1184 R 95.4  0.0  88954:14 fi         
00003 sam   18   0  427m  16m 6308 R 30.0  0.1  54:46.43 fo         
00004 sam   18   0  427m  16m 6308 R 26.5  0.1  52:55.33 fum

Question: What are the units in the "TIME+" column?

What I have tried: (please suggest a better strategy for searching documentation …)

man top | grep -C 4 time or
man top | grep <X> when I substitute minute, hour, day, or HH for X …

Best Answer

minutes:seconds.hundredths

Searching for “TIME+” or for “seconds” gives the answer, kind of (I wouldn't call the man page clear).

This format is inherited from BSD, you also get it with ps u or ps l under Linux.

Related Solutions

What format does man use

Give nroff a go, most recent versions of 'man' use *roff by default.

man man

Shows under Defaults that nroff is the default on my Ubuntu & OS X systems so should be a safe bet.

What does it mean exactly when a processes “Time” has stopped in top

If you run a fake job such as sleep 120 and then watch it in htop you'll notice that its state is S aka "SLEEP" and the processes TIME remains at 0:00.00 for the duration.

That's because that process is consuming 0 CPU time, which is the intent of the TIME column. It tracks the amount of CPU time a given process has used.

ss #1

This count can be confusing at times if a process can run on multiple CPU cores, since it can seemingly consume more time than is available. All that's going on there is that if you have X number of cores, then your time can show up as X * TIME.

Best Answer

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What format does man use

What does it mean exactly when a processes “Time” has stopped in top

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