Sure enough, "wa" is top's abbreviation for I/O waiting time. It amounts for the time the system spends waiting for disk and network operations, while the CPU is sitting on its hands (idle).disciple wrote:
Does anyone know what the "wa" is?
I give it a very visible position in gatotray because long I/O times are often indicative of bad system tuning, or of disk-costly daemons running at the wrong time, or also processes eating too much memory and triggering a lot of swap.
Since the system gets unresponsive during I/O wait 'attacks', they are difficult to identify, but gatotray is always there and can provide a clue in a glimpse without the need to open any app, and acts as a shortcut to 'xterm top', which is a relatively lightweight and fast way to see what is going on.