Where Linux's load average comes from in the kernel
When I was looking into this, I found that just running ps (with -L option to see all threads, not just processes&#x2F;thread group leaders) with some grep&#x2F;sort&#x2F;uniq was the easiest way to break down where does the “too high Linux system load” come from. No need to compile C code or have root access to drill down into load. And you could drill down further by sampling some additional &#x2F;proc&#x2F;PID&#x2F;task&#x2F;TID&#x2F; files, like “syscall”, “stack” to see which (blocked) syscall is contributing to the load and where in the kernel is it stuck. Knowing what kind of process&#x2F;thread level &#x2F;proc files are available and reading&#x2F;sampling them with a shell one-liner is a powerful entry point for performance troubleshooting and may allow you to delay writing advanced kernel tracing scripts further.<p>For those that are interested:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tanelpoder.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;high-system-load-low-cpu-utilization-on-linux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tanelpoder.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;high-system-load-low-cpu-utiliz...</a>