Troubleshooting high cpu usage in c++ programs on Linux requires the same discipline and order in debugging as it does anywhere else. The threads in the program could be hogging cpu because its spinning in a loop or because it's doing a computationally intensive routine. High CPU utilization may not always mean busy thread, it could be spinning. The uptime tool in Linux gives output for what has been happening for the last fifteen minutes. Using top, we can see what processes are the biggest contributors to the problem. Sar is yet another tool that can give more detailed information on the CPU utilization trends. The data is often available offline for use with tools like isag to generate charts or graph. The raw data for the sar tool is stored under /var/log/sa where the various files represent the days of the respective month.The ps and pstree are also useful tools for system analysis. ps -L option gives thread level information. mpstat command is used to report on each of the available CPU on a multiprocessor server. Global average activities among all CPUs are also reported. The KDE system guard (KSysGuard) is the KDE task manager and performance monitor. It enables monitoring of local and remote hosts. The vmstat tool provides information about processes, memory, paging, block I/O, traps and CPU activity. The vmstat command displays either average data or actual samples. The vmstat tool report cpu time as one of the following four:
us: time spent running non-kernel code (user time, including nice time)
sy: time spent running kernel code (system time)
id: time spent idle,
wa: time spent waiting for IO.
vmstat can run in a sampling mode.
Yielding between such computations is a good programming practice but to know where to add these instructions to relieve the cpu requires first to figure out who the culprit is.
 Valgrind is a useful tool for detecting memory leaks.
 The GNU C library comes with builtin functionality to help detect memory issues. however, it does not log the call stacks of the memory allocations it tracks. There are static code analysis tools that can significantly detect code issues much earlier.