nohz=off is the Way to Go
Categories: [ IT ]
Debian Lenny's default kernel is tickless, meaning that there is no periodic
tick anymore. As a result, it seems that some applications that use
periodically short sleeps (as in while(1) { // do possibly something; usleep(250); }
)
are scheduled far too often and the CPU is running more than in should while
the system is seemingly idle. Passing the option nohz=off
to the kernel
seems to have fixed that problem.