Re: Strange top(1) output

On 2005-05-13 05:41, Chuck Swiger <cswiger_at_mac.com> wrote:
> Since Giorgos is the one who seems to be the closest to actively
> writing code, and has asked for feedback, well, I think his suggested
> layout is an improvement, and I agree with these:

First of all, thanks a lot for the feedback :-)

>   + The entire header line is limited to the window width too.
>   + The USERNAME column is hard-limited to 8 characters.
>   + The CPU/WCPU columns occupy the same space and can be toggled with
>     the 'C' keyboard command.
>   + When UID numbers are displayed, hitting 'u' will read a UID instead
>     of a username.
>
> The only thing I *don't* like is splatting the # of threads onto the
> end of the process name, seperated by a slash: that makes it
> remarkably hard to read.

I see.

This is one of those things that you either love or hate, I guess.
Somebody *did* suggest it while we had problems with the THR column
being too wide and pushing COMMAND out of the visible area, so I tried
to use prstat on Solaris 10 for a while to see how things work out.

The output format of prstat is:

          1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8
 12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/LWPID
|   313 daemon   6448K 5584K sleep   58    0   0:11.30 0.2% snmpd/5
|  3817 root     9016K 6640K sleep   58    0   0:00.08 0.1% cfailover/1
|  7366 keramida 4240K 3568K cpu1    58    0   0:00.00 0.1% prstat/1
|  7335 root     3904K 2464K sleep   58    0   0:00.00 0.1% sshd/1

The format of our top, to make comparisons easier is:

          1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8
 12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
|54842 root        1   8    0  2364K  1884K wait     0:09 10.91% 10.69% sh
|  762 keramida    1  96    0 82432K 31280K select   4:53  0.00%  0.00% Xorg
|65426 keramida    4  20    0 44240K 34152K kserel   4:12  0.00%  0.00% firefox-b
|  814 keramida    1  96    0  6188K  4424K select   1:06  0.00%  0.00% wmaker

The main differences, minus reordering of the fields are:

	- Our STATE column is 8 columns wide, while on prstat it uses 6
	- Our TIME column is 5 characters wide vs. prstat's 9
	- We have THR in a column vs. prstat which uses command/N
	- We have both CPU and WCPU
	- SIZE and RSS in prstat are 1 column shorter

The THR column seems a bit of waste in retrospect, because depending on
the workload of the system it may have just one column of useful data.

I'll have to give a bit more of thought to this, but if I don't get
anywhere near a form decision it may make sense to make the appearance
of a THR column run-time configurable.

> I'd be happier with a "#TH" column, and limiting the # of threads to
> displayed to 999 or "+++", or some such.  If we need to drop a column,
> I'd much rather drop the "NICE" column and have a "#TH" column
> instead.

Ideally, all columns should be runtime configurable, much like ps(1) and
its -o option.

> (Which is fine, curses does a lot of hard work that I'm just as happy to
> let it figure out.)

Unfortunately, the current top uses very few of the features that a full
blown curses implementation would have.

- Giorgos