The following is an example of the sampleproc program. Here we run sampleproc for a few seconds on a workstation, # ./sampleproc Sampling at 100 hertz... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C PID CMD COUNT 1659 mozilla-bin 3 109 nscd 4 2197 prstat 23 2190 setiathome 421 PID CMD PERCENT 1659 mozilla-bin 0 109 nscd 0 2197 prstat 5 2190 setiathome 93 The first table shows a count of how many times each process was sampled on the CPU. The second table gives this as a percentage. setiathome was on the CPU 421 times, which is 93% of the samples. The following is sampleproc running on a server with 4 CPUs. A bash shell is running in an infinate loop, # ./sampleproc Sampling at 100 hertz... Hit Ctrl-C to end. ^C PID CMD COUNT 10140 dtrace 1 28286 java 1 29345 esd 2 29731 esd 3 2 pageout 4 29733 esd 6 10098 bash 1015 0 sched 3028 PID CMD PERCENT 10140 dtrace 0 28286 java 0 29345 esd 0 29731 esd 0 2 pageout 0 29733 esd 0 10098 bash 24 0 sched 74 The bash shell was on the CPUs for 24% of the time, which is consistant with a CPU bound single threaded application on a 4 CPU server. The above sample was around 10 seconds long. During this time, there were around 4000 samples (checking the COUNT column), this is due to 4000 = CPUs (4) * Hertz (100) * Seconds (10).