Linux Top Command Field Descriptions

Fields/Column	Description
us	user cpu time (or) % CPU time spent in user space
sy	system cpu time (or) % CPU time spent in kernel space
ni	user nice cpu time (or) % CPU time spent on low priority processes
id	idle cpu time (or) % CPU time spent idle
wa	io wait cpu time (or) % CPU time spent in wait (on disk)
hi	hardware irq (or) % CPU time spent servicing/handling hardware interrupts
si	software irq (or) % CPU time spent servicing/handling software interrupts
st	steal time – – % CPU time in involuntary wait by virtual cpu while hypervisor is servicing another processor (or) % CPU time stolen from a virtual machine

Fields/Column	Description
PID	Process Id
USER	The effective user name of the task’s owner
PR	The priority of the task
NI	The nice value of the task. A negative nice value means higher priority, whereas a positive nice value means lower priority. Zero in this field simply means priority will not be adjusted in determining a task’s dispatchability
%CPU	The task’s share of the elapsed CPU time since the last screen update, expressed as a percentage of total CPU time.
%MEM	A task’s currently used share of available physical memory
TIME+	Total CPU time the task has used since it started
S	The status of the task which can be one of:
	‘D’ = uninterruptible sleep
	‘R’ = running
	‘S’ = sleeping
	‘T’ = traced or stopped
	‘Z’ = zombie
RES	The non-swapped physical memory a task has used
SHR	The amount of shared memory used by a task
Command	Display the command line used to start a task or the name of the associated program