System summary

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The system summary information produced by the curt command describes the time spent by the whole system (all CPUs) in various execution modes.

The following is a sample of the System summary:

               System Summary         
               -------------- 
 processing       percent       percent   
 total time    total time     busy time        
     (msec)  (incl. idle)  (excl. idle)  processing category   
===========   ===========   ===========  ===================   
    4998.65         45.94         75.21  APPLICATION 
     591.59          5.44          8.90  SYSCALL
     110.40          1.02          1.66  HCALL
      48.33          0.44          0.73  KPROC (excluding IDLE and NFS)
     352.23          3.24          5.30  NFS 
     486.19          4.47          7.32  FLIH 
      49.10          0.45          0.74  SLIH 
       8.83          0.08          0.13  DISPATCH (all procs. incl. IDLE) 
       1.04          0.01          0.02  IDLE DISPATCH (only IDLE proc.) 
-----------    ----------       ------- 
    6646.36         61.08        100.00  CPU(s) busy time 
    4234.76         38.92                IDLE 
-----------    ---------- 
   10881.12                              TOTAL

Avg. Thread Affinity =        0.99

Total Physical CPU time (msec) = 20417.45
Physical CPU percentage        = 100.00%

The System Summary has the following fields:

Item	Descriptor
processing total time	Total time in milliseconds for the corresponding processing category.
percent total time	Time from the first column as a percentage of the sum of total trace elapsed time for all processors. This includes whatever amount of time each processor spent running the IDLE process.
percent busy time	Time from the first column as a percentage of the sum of total trace elapsed time for all processors without including the time each processor spent executing the IDLE process.
Avg. Thread Affinity	Probability that a thread was dispatched to the same processor on which it last executed.
Total Physical CPU time	The real time that the virtual processor was running and not preempted.
Physical CPU percentage	Gives the Physical CPU Time as a percentage of total time.

The possible execution modes or processing categories are interpreted as follows:

Item	Descriptor
APPLICATION	The sum of times spent by all processors in User (that is, non-privileged) mode.
SYSCALL	The sum of times spent by all processors doing System Calls. This is the portion of time that a processor spends executing in the kernel code providing services directly requested by a user process.
HCALL	The sum of times spent by all processors doing Hypervisor Calls. This is the portion of time that a processor spends executing in the hypervisor code providing services directly requested by the kernel.
KPROC	The sum of times spent by all processors executing kernel processes other than IDLE and NFS processes. This is the portion of time that a processor spends executing specially created dispatchable processes that only execute kernel code.
NFS	The sum of times spent by all processors executing NFS operations. This is the portion of time that a processor spends executing in the kernel code providing NFS services directly requested by a kernel process.
FLIH	The sum of times spent by all processors executing FLIHs.
SLIH	The sum of times spent by all processors executing SLIHs.
DISPATCH	The sum of times spent by all processors executing the AIX dispatch code. This sum includes the time spent dispatching all threads (that is, it includes dispatches of the IDLE process).
IDLE DISPATCH	The sum of times spent by all processors executing the AIX dispatch code where the process being dispatched was the IDLE process. Because the DISPATCH category includes the IDLE DISPATCH category's time, the IDLE DISPATCH category's time is not separately added to calculate either CPU(s) busy time or TOTAL (see below).
CPU(s) busy time	The sum of times spent by all processors executing in APPLICATION, SYSCALL, KPROC, FLIH, SLIH, and DISPATCH modes.
IDLE	The sum of times spent by all processors executing the IDLE process.
TOTAL	The sum of CPU(s) busy time and IDLE.

The System Summary example indicates that the CPU is spending most of its time in application mode. There is still 4234.76 ms of IDLE time so there is enough CPU to run applications. If there is insufficient CPU power, do not expect to see any IDLE time. The Avg. Thread Affinity value is 0.99 showing good processor affinity; that is, threads returning to the same processor when they are ready to be run again.