CPU percent

A recent post on the ODC General Database forum asked for an explanation of the AWR report values “%Total CPU” and “%Busy CPU” under the “Instance CPU” label, and how the “%Busy CPU “ could be greater than 100%.  Here’s a text reproduction of the relevant sample supplied:

Host CPU

CPUs	Cores	Sockets	Load Average Begin	Load Average End	%User	%System	%WIO	%Idle
2	2	1	0.30	1.23	10.7	5.6	5.3	77.7

Instance CPU

%Total CPU	%Busy CPU	%DB Time waiting for CPU (Resource Manager)
29.8	133.8	0.0

The answer is probably “It’s 12.1 and it’s a programmer error”.

• Note that the Host CPU %Idle is not consistent with the three usage figures:  10.7 + 5.6 + 5.3 = 21.6 whereas 100 – 77.7 = 22.3.
• So let’s run with 22.3% and see what else we can notice: 29.8 / 22.3 = 1.3363 – that’s pretty close (when expressed as a percentage) to 133.8%

Hypothesis:

Someone did the division the wrong way round when trying to work out the percentage of the host’s non-idle CPU that could be attributed to the instance. In this example the “%Busy CPU” should actually report 100 * 22.3 / 29.8 = 74.8%

Note – the difference between 133.8 and 133.63 can be attributed to the fact that the various figures reported in this bit of the AWR are rounded to the nearest 1 decimal place.

Note 2 – I don’t think this error is present in 11.2.0.4 or 12.2.0.1