Comment by steventhedev

Aside from the technical beauty of this post, what is the practical impact of this?

Fan speeds should ideally be looking at temperature sensors, CPU idling is working albeit with interrupt waits as pointed out here. The only impact seems to be surprise that the CPU is working harder than it really is when looking at this number.

It's far better to look at the system load (which was 0.0 - already a strong hint this system is working below capacity). It has a formal definition (average waiting cpu task queue depth over 1, 5, 10 minutes) and succinctly captures the concept of "this machine is under load".

Many years ago, a coworker deployed a bad auditd config. CPU usage was below 10%, but system load was 20x the number of cores. We moved all our alerts to system load and used that instead.