“Stalled means the processor was not making forward progress with instructions, and usually happens because it is waiting on memory I/O. The ratio I drew above (between busy and stalled) is what I typically see in production. Chances are, you're mostly stalled, but don't know it.”— Brendan Gregg, brendangregg.com
“You can additionally reduce latency by applying CPU affinity on each thread/process, e.g. nginx has worker_cpu_affinity directive, that can automatically bind each web server process to its own core. This should eliminate CPU migrations, reduce cache misses and pagefaults, and slightly increase inst…”— Alexey Ivanov, blogs.dropbox.com