Help with processing time...

This is one area of performance I have never fully understood. From what I understand, processes shouldn't run longer then a few minutes before they either end or sleep. If a process has been running say, 15 hours and has used 209 minutes of cumulative CPU time (it is a web server) and is listed at the top of the list using the 'top' command, would that be considered a lot or not? I guess my question is where do you draw the line between what has used too much CPU time and needs to be killed VS. what would normal even if the CPU time is high?

Thanks,

Jon

A webserver may be busy for long periods. Servers are daemons that stay up and run as long as the box is up.

And no, processes that provide services like ftp or apache or whatever run forever and may use a lot of cpu. You may want to check out whether the load you see is "bogus" or not. Like somebody trying a denial of service attack, for example.