Management asks for a quick, online change that can immediately ease the CPU saturation without adding hardware. Which action is the most appropriate first step?
Disable simultaneous multithreading (SMT/Hyper-Threading) in the firmware at the next maintenance window.
Increase the net.core.somaxconn kernel parameter to enlarge the TCP listen backlog.
Remount /tmp as a tmpfs to move temporary files into RAM.
Run cpupower frequency-set --governor performance to switch all CPUs from powersave to performance.
The load averages are more than twice the number of CPU cores, showing that many tasks are waiting for CPU time. mpstat confirms the CPUs are almost never idle, so this is a true CPU bottleneck rather than an I/O or network issue. Because every core is locked to the powersave governor, the processors are running at their minimum frequency. Switching to the performance governor (cpupower frequency-set --governor performance) lets the CPUs run at their maximum clock, instantly increasing available cycles while the system stays online.
The other actions do not immediately free CPU capacity:
Disabling SMT/Hyper-Threading would reduce the number of logical CPUs and make the bottleneck worse until the next reboot.
Mounting /tmp on tmpfs mainly affects disk I/O latency, not sustained CPU load.
Raising net.core.somaxconn only changes the TCP listen backlog and does not address CPU contention. Therefore, changing the CPU governor is the best immediate mitigation.
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