What does it mean % Cpu Utilization in application runtime statistics?

Question

When I run an application and, at the same time, I use a runtime evaluator in order to profile my program, I get, at the end of the process, many statistics. One of this is the Cpu utilization time.

Typically what is the Cpu utilization time? Well you might tell me the percantage calculated dividing the global time that process spent in cpu by the overall simulation time. Well, unfortunately my statistics are very deep and the program I am using is very precise and gets me a chart about the cpu utilization time.

So in my chart I have on x axis the time and on y axis the cpu utilization time in %.

So something like this:

cpu%
^
|
|
|             * 
|          *    *                           *
|      *             *                   *
|    *                    *          *   
|   *                      *       * 
| *                         *     *
|*                             *
-------------------------------------------------> time

So, what does it mean? How should I interpret the following sentence?

"The cpu utilization percentage for process 'MyProcess' at time '5.23 s' is 12%"

Solution

It's the percent of the CPU's cycles being spent on your process. If your process was using 100% of the CPU's possible time it would be 100%. At 12% it's probably waiting on I/O or something like that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_usage.