heavy cpu usage on RHEL

wolfperkins · 10-22-2007, 07:41 AM

Hi,

I am running RHEL 4 and using as my desktop environment (KDE). This morning it started to behave poorly on CPU usage. I ran top and it displays 80-90% usage on the "%hi" column. Load is around 8-9.

What is the meaning of the %hi column and what locally could account for such usage?

Is this local disk I/O or something else?

Thanks

François

brianmcgee · 10-22-2007, 09:52 AM

That is highmem.

All memory above the address of 896MB is temporarily mapped into kernel virtual memory everytime the kernel needs to access that memory.