drbrain - 11:06 pm on Aug 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

You really should look at total server load, not per-process CPU usage. At the top of the top(1) display there are three decimal numbers representing the number of processes waiting for the CPU now, an average for the past five minutes, and an average for the past fifteen minutes. These three numbers are the "load average"

Its ok if the first load average spikes above one, but as the five and fifteen minute averages push up past one you may need to look into doing some tuning. Your box may be able to consistently run with "high" load averages (3+ 5+) without any perceptible slowdown.

You may also have a poorly performing script that is not CPU dependent at all, but instead has to wait on IO. You can determine this kind of problem if pages serve more slowly with many concurrent requests, but the load averages do not increase to match.

PS: It is nearly useless to compare the load average on two differently configured machines (both hardware and software). It is only useful for seeing how much work your machine is doing now compared to some point in the past.