This is the real answer. Other apps might be bottlenecked by IO so the CPU doesn’t work as hard. Get faster disks, the CPU will see more use. Since top is so small that it loads into memory almost instantly, and has no need for further IO, the CPU is free to spin all the way!
People get worked up when CPU usage is high, but unless there’s a resource leak somewhere, that just means the computer is working at full efficiency.
Unless bottlenecked somewhere else, we would want to see 100 % with everything that takes more than some milliseconds.
This is the real answer. Other apps might be bottlenecked by IO so the CPU doesn’t work as hard. Get faster disks, the CPU will see more use. Since
top
is so small that it loads into memory almost instantly, and has no need for further IO, the CPU is free to spin all the way!People get worked up when CPU usage is high, but unless there’s a resource leak somewhere, that just means the computer is working at full efficiency.