You may notice that the graphing of CPU Total and CPU by Process (e.g. Workload top 10) don't match on multi-CPU or multi-core Windows servers. For example, you may see that your total CPU averages 50% but your top 10 shows 3 processes all at 70% CPU.

This difference is related to the way Windows tracks its performance counters at the process level. The maximum CPU usage is always 100% at the CPU total level. At the per-process level, the total will be 100% x the number of cores. So on a 2-CPU dual-core server, your per-process workload may go as high as 400%.

Keeping this in mind, you can quickly divide per-process CPU workload by the number of cores to get a true understanding of how much of the total CPU a single process is consuming instead of seeing how much of a single core it is consuming.

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