25

if press h inside htop for quick help:

CPU

Blue      : Low-priority threads
Green     : Normal priority threads
Red       : Kernel threads
Turquoise : Virtualization threads

but yellow?

IMAGE: See htop result

IvanTrofimov
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  • ServerFault dupe: [What exactly do the colors in htop status bars mean?](http://serverfault.com/q/180711) – DavidPostill Apr 07 '16 at 10:30
  • This depends on the htop colour theme in use (default) and the terminal color scheme. – DavidPostill Apr 07 '16 at 10:34
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    In fairness the 'dupe' doesn't have any top level answer that addresses the 'yellow' for CPU issue. You have to dig into the comments to get the answer below. – russellpierce Nov 19 '17 at 03:55
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    How can we remove the "dupe" flag? That other question doesn't mention yellow cpu. – falsePockets Dec 14 '18 at 07:11
  • For me this IOwait was caused from an AWS T instance running out of CPU credit but can also be caused from EBS/Disk being too slow or running out of credit too. – mRyan Dec 06 '22 at 11:57

2 Answers2

17

In my case, yellow means that the CPU time is spent on virtualization (for VDS) and CPU is lost. Change your hosting provider.

IvanTrofimov
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    That's called "steal" time. It's CPU time that is unavailable to your instance due to other people making heavy use of the CPU on the same physical machine. Upon request, a decent VPS provider may move your instance to a host with less CPU contention; I know mine (Linode) would. – bwDraco Apr 11 '16 at 04:31
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Making an educated guess: you've got htop's detailed CPU time display on. Under the Black Night colorscheme, yellow is io-wait. Which makes sense for a database server.

Laikulo
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