CPU States

This line indicates the amount of time the CPU spent in each of several states, displayed as percentages. The numbers reflect the percentage of the time since the last screen update that the CPu spent in each state. The output for this line requires past history, and it is not shown on the first display that top produces.

The first four states in the list below are found on most every Unix system. Other state names may appear on different platforms, and some of these are also listed below.

Idle	Nothing to do
User	Running a user's process
Kernel	Handling a kernel call, fault, or interrupt
Nice	Running a user's niced process
Wait	Waiting on some form of i/o
iowait	Waiting on user i/o
Swap	Waiting on swapping or paging i/o