I'm trying to understand what stress command actually does in Linux, in particular -c option. My background is Physics, so I'm struggling with some concepts.
Does stress -c launch 3 processes that consume 100% of 3 bounded CPU cores (for example core 0, 1, 3)? The output of htop is confusing since I don't see 3 CPU cores at 100% all the time. Note: with bounded, I mean that these processes cannot run on other CPU cores (in this case 4 to N).
For example, after running stress -c 3, sometimes I see this (which makes sense to me):
But most of the time I'm seeing something like this (which doesn't because there aren't 3 CPU cores at 100%):
