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Contradictory information from "top" [duplicate]

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linux-howto

http://unix.stackexchange.com – As we all know, the top command displays various real-time information about the running system. What I can't figure out is this: top claims that gzip is using 95% CPU. (Not unreasonable, considering I just asked it to compress a 20GB file!) But top also claims that the system is 75% "idle". What the hell...? Basically I wanted to figure out whether stuff is taking so long due to insufficient CPU or insufficient disk bandwidth. But the above statistics just leave me baffled. (HowTos)