High CPU usage is a common issue in every system, finding the root cause is not always easy.
What the sign of a high CPU usage?
I normally look at load avg , if the load avg is higher than the number of your CPU cores , then your system is overloaded.
I have 8 cores, so my number is good. Sometimes we our load avg does not reach to the cpu cores , but we still see some application is slow, it’s because there is a process occupies the one single CPU core.
My next step will be check the CPU usage per process .
with command: top
Remember that a process might have many threads, we need to find which threads are using too much CPU. I use the command below
ps -T -p 19184
I will look at 2 columns : PSID and Time
Process with long time will be mostly the process causing high CPU.
Once you know the process id , run a strace command
strace -p 19198
A bunch of stuff will be shown here. This will give you some lights to the issue.
