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CPU Power

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mat989



Joined: 03 Jul 2009
Posts: 3

Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2009 8:24 pm    Post subject: CPU Power  

Regarding This:
http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm#how-do-i-get-my-fair-share-of-cpu

I thought this option is available for OpenVZ only and not XEN...!
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dcelasun



Joined: 30 Nov 2008
Posts: 109

Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 7:07 am    Post subject:  

Well, you thought wrong. I can usually burst up to 400% when the host is idle.
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hoopycat



Joined: 30 Aug 2008
Posts: 1286
Location: Rochester, New York

Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 9:42 am    Post subject:  

... and usually even when it's not. CPU is there for the taking... at any given moment, the CPU is either doing productive work, or twiddling its thumbs. Rare is the moment in which it's not twiddling its thumbs.

So, by God, don't feel bad about using the CPU! Embrace the pbzip2! Compile a kernel with -j5; feel the burn! (Note that idle tasks like seti@home or boinc will likely result in less CPU being available for you, so save those for your home/dedicated machines :-)
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hybinet



Joined: 02 May 2008
Posts: 1058

Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 11:53 am    Post subject:  

Best of all, each host machine has 8 cores (800% total), so even if one person bursts to 400%, other people on the host still have plenty of CPU to work with. No more "one person monopolizing all host resources" BS that you often see with OpenVZ providers.

@hoopycat: Last time I checked, it's against Linode's terms of service to deliberately perform highly resource-intensive tasks on your server. So it's not only a bad idea to fold@home with your Linode, it might even be a reason for suspension. Pbzip2 might be okay, though...
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hoopycat



Joined: 30 Aug 2008
Posts: 1286
Location: Rochester, New York

Posted: Sat Jul 04, 2009 1:18 pm    Post subject:  

Xen is decently tweakable from a resource allocation standpoint, so sustained full-throttle CPU usage will probably get an "is everything OK?" ticket and a decrease in processor priority if required. So, it's definitely to be avoided. However, if pbzip2 is wrong, I don't want to be right ;-)
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waldo



Joined: 21 May 2009
Posts: 336

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 11:25 am    Post subject:  

Quote: Rare is the moment in which it's not twiddling its thumbs.

But aside from sustained CPU usage. Every time, I log into my Linode it's showing the "Host Load" as idle, it's never showing any load for me. Either I'm the only account on my Linode, unlikely, or the other 39ish Linode 360s are similar to me and don't have anything really intensive going on.

Or maybe Xen is tweaked in such a way to give us decent performance but no matter what we did we wouldn't be able to take the server down? I don't know. I just know I'm very happy with Linode. Support is top notch. Staff's technical expertise is top notch. Customer service is top notch. Price is good. I'm happy :)
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mnordhoff



Joined: 03 May 2008
Posts: 449

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 11:58 am    Post subject:  

waldo wrote: Every time, I log into my Linode it's showing the "Host Load" as idle, it's never showing any load for me. Either I'm the only account on my Linode, unlikely, or the other 39ish Linode 360s are similar to me and don't have anything really intensive going on.

This may or may not be correct, but I heard that the transition to Xen made "host load" kind of useless. It shows the dom0's load, which isn't affected much by the guests, or something.
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waldo



Joined: 21 May 2009
Posts: 336

Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 12:57 pm    Post subject:  

That could also explain why I've never seen a load :)
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adam



Joined: 11 May 2009
Posts: 11
Location: New York

Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 11:09 am    Post subject:  

So I've got this script running on my linode that occasionally decides to go nuts and take up 100% of the CPU. I'm having an awful time debugging it...do I need to worry that I'm messing up other people's servers while my script is in an infinite loop, or will Xen throttle my CPU usage automatically to be fair to others?

I'm hoping it's the latter...it's not multithreaded, so it's at worst taking up one CPU, but still...
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