The wa field represents the percentage of time the CPUs were idle while at least one process was waiting for I/O completion. A value of 94 % wa means the processors spend nearly all their time waiting on disk (or other block-device) operations, not executing instructions. This points to an I/O subsystem bottleneck such as an over-saturated or failing disk array. High CPU (us or sy), memory exhaustion, or excessive interrupts would appear as elevated user, system, or hi/si percentages instead, not wa.
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