How can the cause of high CPU load on a Linux system be determined?

To determine the cause of high CPU load on Linux, you can use several tools and approaches:

• top or htop — show processes with the highest CPU usage in real-time.
• ps aux --sort=-%cpu — displays a list of processes sorted by CPU load.
• pidstat — allows tracking CPU usage by specific processes with details.
• perf — a profiling tool to identify bottlenecks.
• strace — for analyzing system calls of a process if a hang is suspected.

Example of using top:

top

The top part will display overall CPU load, and below that, processes with their resource consumption. You can get additional information or terminate a problematic process by PID.

Also, check system logs (/var/log/syslog or journalctl) for errors that might affect performance.