How to Diagnose High CPU Usage on Linux: Step‑by‑Step Guide
This guide walks you through checking CPU usage, system load, resource consumption, process tracing, log inspection, and performance bottleneck analysis on Linux to pinpoint and resolve high CPU utilization issues.
1. Check CPU Usage
First, check CPU usage on a Linux system using top or htop. If the usage exceeds 80%, further investigation is needed.
2. Check System Load
Use uptime to view the average load. If the load is more than twice the number of CPU cores, the system is considered overloaded.
3. Check System Resources
Identify processes consuming excessive resources with pidstat -p <pid> 1, which prints per‑second resource usage for the specified PID.
4. Inspect the Process
If a process shows high usage, trace its system calls with strace -p <pid> to locate the problem.
5. Review System Logs
Examine /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog using tail -f /var/log/messages /var/log/syslog for recent events and errors.
6. Identify System Bottlenecks
When previous steps do not reveal the cause, use performance tools such as perf top to see which functions consume the most CPU time.
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