Every evening the reporting VM crawls, vmstat shows constant si and so, and the CPUs burn in system time. What is happening?

The box looks CPU-starved but the CPUs are starving themselves. Reading the reclaim loop correctly separates people who have sat on the console from people who have read about it.

Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in researched DevOps, SRE and platform engineering interview loops, written to a senior-engineer editorial bar, and never padded to hit a word count.

The box looks CPU-starved but the CPUs are starving themselves. Reading the reclaim loop correctly separates people who have sat on the console from people who have read about it.

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