Recently, a student from our training camp came to me with a pressing issue - their travel backend system had suddenly spiked in CPU usage and was unable to recover. They had analyzed the situation themselves but were unable to pinpoint the cause. Given the urgency of the situation, I offered to help them troubleshoot the problem using Windows Debugger (Windbg).
I took the dump from them and we began our analysis. First, I asked myself, why would a system's CPU usage suddenly skyrocket?