CPU Ready

What Does CPU Ready Mean?

CPU ready is a type of processing statistic that represents the amount of time that a component is ready to process a job but is waiting on a scheduler for access to a physical processor. It is used in virtualization setups and other kinds of IT hardware architectures.

Techopedia Explains CPU Ready

This type of metric is most commonly used in virtualization systems. The idea is that, in creating many different virtual machines (VMs) from sophisticated software, engineers have to recognize that all of these different virtual components will be sharing resources. One of the shared resources is processing power. In order to accommodate this, a tool called a scheduler runs to give different VMs "turns" on a processor.

With CPU ready (%ready), the virtual machine is ready to go, but it has to wait for other jobs to be processed before it gets CPU access. Developers and administrators use CPU ready as a very important metric to see whether virtual machines are waiting too long for scheduled jobs. CPU ready has everything to do with system performance and efficiency. Experts have shown many ways to decrease the wait time or, in other words, decrease the CPU-ready statistic, using strategies like different distributed computing design, addition of more processing power, process staggering and other methods.