PingDirectory

System-Wide CPU utilization

To investigate CPU consumption of the system as a whole, use the vmstat command with a time interval in seconds, like:

vmstat 5

The specific output of this command varies between different operating systems, but it includes the percentage of the time the CPU was spent executing user-space code (user time), the percentage of time spent executing kernel-space code (system time), and the percentage of time not executing any code (idle time).

If the CPUs are spending most of their time executing user-space code, the available processors are being well-utilized. If performance is poor or the server is unresponsive, it can indicate that the server is not optimally tuned. If there is a high system time, it can indicate that the system is performing excessive disk and/or network I/O, or in some cases, there can be some other system-wide problem like an interrupt storm. If the system is mostly idle but the server is performing poorly or is unresponsive, there can be a resource constraint elsewhere (for example, waiting on disk or memory access, or excessive lock contention), or the JVM can be performing other tasks like stop-the-world garbage collection that cannot be run heavily in parallel.