On my CentOS 6.3 Server, after an OS restart, I see a strange behavior from the top command. In the default view of top (which is obviously sorted by CPU%) I see the following:
1) Many processes are at 100% (or even much much higher) CPU usage despite the fact that the load average is still very low (Please see the screen shot) and the server is almost doing nothing.
2) Although processes should be sorted by CPU%, they seem to be in a semi-random order: Very low usage processes are still at the bottom but the higher percents are at the top with no specific order! (Please see the screen shot)
I have also double checked and made sure that the sorting is based on CPU% (F > k)
This wasn't the case before the server restart, and I am almost sure I haven't installed any special packages.
Any idea what is going wrong here?
More observations
More examination gives me the feeling that in my case, top is showing a more detailed info of resource usage by processes than before. I see processes that I know use CPU resources for a very very very short time and they normally never showed up in top before (for example, Nginx). But now, I see them constantly showing up on the top of the list. Still have no idea what the problem is...