u/Apprehensive-Buy7455

Disclosure: I'm affiliated with RoszigIT, where this article is published. Sharing because the mechanics are worth discussing, not to pitch anything. I tried to make it technical as always.

• Pod can have 40% cpu usage in metrics and still have performance issues
• How a burst that uses all 4 cores can exhaust a whole period's quota in 50ms real-time, freezing the container for the remaining 50ms — invisible on an averaged CPU graph
• Where to actually look: nr_throttled / throttled_usec in cpu.stat, plus why PSI (cpu.pressure) and hypervisor steal time (%st) catch different failure modes that cpu.stat misses entirely

https://roszigit.com/en/blog/kubernetes-cpu-throttling/