Topical Takes

Short, opinionated posts on eBPF, Linux internals, and the tools we all run in production.

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How to Find Which Process Is Slowing Down Your Linux Machine: Blocked Is Not Busy

A process can look like it is eating your workstation while the kernel's own per-process accounting shows it barely ran. Read sum_exec_runtime and run_delay from /proc/PID/schedstat, the voluntary and nonvoluntary context switch counters from /proc/PID/status, and syscr against read_bytes from /proc/PID/io, and you can confirm or kill the theory with cat before installing a profiler.

schedstatcontext-switchesproc-filesystemcpu-accountingprofilingeBPFlinuxyeet
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