runqlat.bt(8) System Manager's Manual runqlat.bt(8)
NAME
runqlat.bt - CPU scheduler run queue latency as a histogram. Uses bpf-
trace/eBPF.
SYNOPSIS
runqlat.bt
DESCRIPTION
This traces time spent waiting in the CPU scheduler for a turn on-CPU.
This metric is often called run queue latency, or scheduler latency.
This tool shows this latency as a power-of-2 histogram in nanoseconds,
allowing multimodal distributions to be studied, as well as latency
outliers.
This tool uses the sched tracepoints.
Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.
REQUIREMENTS
CONFIG_BPF and bpftrace.
EXAMPLES
Trace CPU run queue latency system wide, printing a histogram on Ctrl-
C:
# runqlat.bt
FIELDS
1st, 2nd
This is a range of latency, in microseconds (shown in "[...)"
set notation).
3rd A column showing the count of scheduler events in this range.
4th This is an ASCII histogram representing the count column.
OVERHEAD
This traces scheduler functions, which can become very frequent. While
eBPF has very low overhead, and this tool uses in-kernel maps for effi-
ciency, the frequency of scheduler events for some workloads may be
high enough that the overhead of this tool becomes significant. Measure
in a lab environment to quantify the overhead before use.
SOURCE
This is from bpftrace.
https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace
Also look in the bpftrace distribution for a companion _examples.txt
file containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.
This is a bpftrace version of the bcc tool of the same name. The bcc
tool may provide more options and customizations.
https://github.com/iovisor/bcc
OS
Linux
STABILITY
Unstable - in development.
AUTHOR
Brendan Gregg
SEE ALSO
runqlen.bt(8), mpstat(1), pidstat(1), uptime(1)
USER COMMANDS 2018-09-17 runqlat.bt(8)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 15:30:06 CET 2025.