High % CPU Stealing

I have just set up a new 1GB Linode instance with standard Ubuntu 16.04 image in the London data center.

Without running any other applications (no databases, no webservers, nothing) performance is really slow.

Linux Top shows %CPU st (CPU stealing) ranging between 10 to 75%.

As a baseline I have a similar 2GB instance in the NJ data centre with much better performance and %CPU st 0.0 to 0.3.

So I guess I have to ditch this poor performing instance and start a new instance somewhere else; and also check CPU performance prior to installing anything …

Does anyone have similar experiences / suggestions ?

3 Replies

Which process is consuming all the CPU?

We have seen the same thing with a lot of our machines, starting in November, 2017. I don't know if we were lucky previously or if Linode have changed their overselling quotas recently. Disk latency became worse at the same time, but that problem has improved.

We monitor this using Munin, and on some machines you can clearly see an entire CPU core being stolen. This is one of the worst instances of CPU steal we have had: https://pixelstore.se/dl/steal/

In all cases we ask support to move us to another less loaded host and that have fixed the problem for us. Sometimes we have had to move twice before the problem disappears.

@emilv:

We monitor this using Munin, and on some machines you can clearly see an entire CPU core being stolen. This is one of the worst instances of CPU steal we have had: https://pixelstore.se/dl/steal/

In all cases we ask support to move us to another less loaded host and that have fixed the problem for us. Sometimes we have had to move twice before the problem disappears.

That steal time is quite bad. But, I second your suggestion to request Linode support to move the server to another host. And, like you, we've occasionally had to move twice before the problem was fixed.

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