06-25-2013 11:04 AM
The CPU output from the TOP command can not be used to determine dataplane load. The pan_task processes are always at 100% CPU utilization as they are the individual software processes which perform packet processing on the dataplane.
As others have stated, you should use output from "show running resource-monitor" on the CLI to determine the true dataplane load. This command is also run and logged to the dp-monitor.log files on the dataplane so you can look at historical utilization as well. In the output from this command on a 2050 you will see 4 individual cores listed, 0-3. The pan_task processes shown in the top output correspond to cores 1-3 listed in this output. On other platforms you will find a pan_task process is running for each core beyond core 0.
