Can the %MEM value for a process show more than 100% in top output?Is this ever possible?
the %MEM is the percentage of RES used from your total memory. Your RES i suppose could be using a large amount of memory and also swap space.
Theoretically yes it could show more than 100% however if its using up so much memory it needs swap space you need to increase your physical memory!!
But if the system is not swapping then i guess more than 100% value in %MEM is impossible. Am i right/
I would have though if your not using swap then a single process can't be using more than 100% memory it would be impossible. But i could be wrong.
Documentation suggests it's the task's share of available physical memory. So unless something is wrong with the program that's calculating this, or with the kernel that's doing the memory accounting, no it's not possible.
I have 4 procs on an HP/UX box, generally CPU idle is how top is displayed
If the CPU idle goes below 10% you are in trouble, if it hit 0% expect to deal with system dump