Table of Contents

What is the CPU Utilization ?

About

This page is about the CPU Utilization metrics and is the most important metrics of all CPU metrics

CPU utilization is defined as being:

Calculation Example

If:

it is 50% utilized for that second.

The CPU utilization is the sum of the usage across all cores.

Therefore on:

Note on Core

Current processor technology is much more complex. A single processor package may contain multiple cores with dynamically changing frequencies, hardware multithreading, and shared caches. These technological advances can change the behavior of CPU utilization reporting mechanisms and increase the difficulty of performance analysis.

Performance investigation, testing and analysis

If an application (myapp.exe) typically uses 25% CPU on lab test machines, but is using 99% of the CPU on another system, this could be indicative of a performance bug.

Implication with Energy Consumption

CPU utilization has important implications on other system performance characteristics, namely power consumption.

Documentation / Reference