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> You can figure out what %CPU really means by using additional metrics, including instructions per cycle (IPC)

Correct me if I am wrong, but this won't work for spinlocks in busy loops: you do have a lot of instructions being executed, but the whole point of the loop is to wait for the cache to synchronize, and as such, this should be taken as "stalled".



Which is mentioned in the article (which few people fully read of course)!

See under "Other reasons CPU Utilization is misleading"

> Spin locks: the CPU is utilized, and has high IPC, but the app is not making logical forward progress.




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