Does a linux process have a limit on how much cpu it can use up?

Question

If I run a process as root on an out-of-the-box fedora machine, is there any reason for a process to not be able to use up ~80% of the cpu?

Answer 1

There are several reasons why a process might not use up all of the CPU. A process may have a limitation on how much CPU it uses, such as a loop that sleeps every once in a while in order to avoid using too much CPU or battery. Or a process may be I/O bound; that is, it needs to do I/O frequently (disk I/O, network I/O, or swapping in lots of memory). A process may also be niced to be lower priority and take up less CPU when another process needs it.

Answer 2

See the ulimit command

Answer 3

Any process can use 100% CPU. Even on a multicore machine - it could spawn threads or child processes which are run on the other cores. Generally if the process is using 100% CPU, it is because it is CPU bound and must do so to complete its work. There is nothing wrong with this, unless the app is written inefficiently.

You may want to look at renice if you want the process to share the CPU more nicely with other processes.

(Hope the link is OK by you, mgb.)