[RandomBK]

Another approach may be to take inspiration from the `cpu load` metric on *nix systems and go _above_ 100%. In this example, the CPU usage would be `200%`: The system would like to be doing twice as much as it's currently doing, but something's throttling it.

Of course, this opens up other issues with how to aggregate multiple cores, what the benchmark for 'max' should be, etc.

Perhaps the more fundamental answer is that there's no single metric that can sum up the situation for all use cases, in which case displaying '100%' would be more useful for a typical consumer while exposing multiple detailed metrics would be more useful for system admins and power users.

[axaxs]

Not following. Linux reports each core as 100%. So an 8 core machine maxes at 800%.

So seeing 200 load doesn't indicate to me that it's throttled, but that it's using the equivalent of two full cores. Or did I misunderstand?

[viraptor]

The context was load average, not CPU usage percentage. The load of 1 means (more or less, I'm simplifying) "all the time there one task ready to be run, so no other task is starved". In most systems/situations you'd see load <1. But there are specific cases where it would be silly high. For example I've seen >400 on a VoIP conference server.

It's more of a "pressure" / "need" measurement. And yeah, applying that to per-process CPU measurement would be interesting.

[sharedfrog]

They're saying it can go over 1(00%) per core.

[rahimiali]

You might be thinking of the load average, not the cpu consumption of a particular process as reported, by, say, top or ps. The article is about the latter kind of tool.