The commands
ps
and top
express CPU time differently. While ps
calculates it by “total CPU time” divided by “time task is running”, top
shows the value as a percentage of overall CPU time.
For
ps
, this means that the longer a process is running without a high CPU utilization the smaller the value of%cpu
gets (it converges to zero).
For
top
, this means that it displays this value as share of the CPU time since last screen update and is therefore more accurate in terms of “current CPU utilization”.