I was curious about why my iBook was running so slowly, so I opened up the terminal and ran “top”, which is a Unix program to give you system statistics. Here’s what it told me:
Load Avg: 0.21, 0.19, 0.02
CPU usage: 3.8% user, 5.7% sys, 90.6% idle
PhysMem: 26.0M wired, 65.8M active, 33.5M inactive, 125M used, 2.69M free
Now, I don’t claim to be a Macintosh expert, but I’m guessing the slowness has something to do with the 2.69MB of RAM free (of 128MB total). Looks like I had better order that extra 512MB RAM stick in a hurry!
However, I’m very happy with the 90% idle CPU usage! Good to know that my concerns that a 900MHz G3 processor wouldn’t be fast enough were unfounded.
My top
07:47:05 up 3 days, 19:35, 1 user, load average: 1.09, 1.18, 1.07
80 processes: 78 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.5% user 0.0% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 99.4% idle
Mem: 513848k av, 507324k used, 6524k free, 0k shrd, 92272k buff
383564k actv, 0k in_d, 10952k in_c
Swap: 1044216k av, 14536k used, 1029680k free 314712k cached
Amendment
I didn’t realize it until I rebooted just now, but by default my system boots to the single-proc Linux kernel, so those figures were for only one P3-450 processor. It’s running two now, as it should.
Sig9