CPU visualization

Over the years, simple tools like cpustate have allowed you to get a quick visualization of cpu utilization on Solaris. It's sufficiently simple and useful that emulating it was one of the first demos I put together using JKstat.

Its presentation starts to suffer as core and thread counts continue to rise. So recently I added vertical bars as an option. This allows a more compact representation, and also works better given that most screens are wider that they are tall.

Still, even that doesn't work very well on a 128-way machine. And, by treating all cpus equally, you can't see how the load is distributed in terms of the processor topology.

However, as of the new release of SolView there's now a 'vertical' option for the enhanced cpustate demo included there.

So, what's here? This is a 2-chip system (actually an X4170M2), each chip has 6 cores, each of which has 2 threads. The chips are stacked above each other, and within each chip is a smaller display for each core, and within each core are its threads. All grouped together to show how the threads and cores are related, and each core and chip having an aggregate display.

Above is a T5140 - 2 chips, each with 8 cores each with 8 threads.

I find it interesting to watch these for a while, and you can see how work is scheduled. What you normally see is an even spread across the cores. Normally, if there's an idle core you see a process sent there rather than running on a thread on a busy core and competing for shared resources. (Not always: you can see on the first graph that there's one idle core and another core with both threads busy, which is unusual.) The scheduler is clearly aware of the processor topology and generally distributes the work pretty well to make best use of the available cores.