How do I get 300% CPU usage? Is top command flawed? [duplicate]

Here's a picture of the top command on my VPS.

enter image description here

As you can see sqlserver + dotnet are taking near 300% CPU usage. How is that even possible?

Can I trust top results from now on? Is this app flawed and buggy?


In top - 100% is the 'full' load of one CPU 'thread' - on a non HT processor, that's one physical core, and on a Hyperthreading capable processor (where you can run 2, or even more threads per physical processor), one of the virtual cores. Your processor are taking about one and half of one processor's 'maximum' performance each, and that shouldn't be an issue as long as your total usage isn't Nx100%.

htop tends to show this a little more precisely, with processor load per core graphs, but fundamentally, its working as designed.