Top Command: How come CPU% in process is higher than in overall CPU Usage Percentage

Question

How come CPU% in process is higher than in overall CPU Usage Percentage

top - 19:42:24 up 68 days, 19:49,  6 users,  load average: 439.72, 540.53, 631.13
Tasks: 354 total,   3 running, 350 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 21.5%us, 46.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 17.4%id,  0.0%wa,  0.1%hi, 14.2%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  65973304k total, 50278472k used, 15694832k free, 28749456k buffers
Swap: 19455996k total,    93436k used, 19362560k free, 14769728k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 4425 ladm   20   0 63.6g 211m 1020 S **425.7**  0.3 433898:26 zzz
28749 isdm   20   0  167g 679m 7928 S 223.7  1.1   2526:40 xxx
28682 iadm   20   0  167g 1.1g 7928 S 212.8  1.8   2509:08 ccc
28834 iladm   20   0 11.8g 377m 7968 S 136.3  0.6 850:25.78 vvv
 7776 root      20   0  237m 139m  11m S  3.3  0.2 658:24.58 bbbb
   45 root      20   0     0    0    0 R  1.1  0.0   1313:36 nnnn/10
 1313 isom   20   0  103m  712  504 S  1.1  0.0   0:00.20 mmmm.sh
 4240 ladm   20   0  338m  18m  576 S  1.1  0.0 558:21.33 memcached
32341 root      20   0 15172 1440  916 R  1.1  0.0   0:00.04 top

Answer 1

The machine in question is using 100% of the cores available. In the situation presented, the pc or server has more than 1 core, therefore a process can use more than 1. That's why one process can use 425.7%, meaning that it's using more than 4 cores to do its job.