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Acceptable CPU steal?
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Acceptable CPU steal?

I have a few different VPS's with different providers across Europe with similar specs using KVM virtualisation. Over the past week I noticed the load average increase significantly, and then looking at the CPU 'steal' metric, it's gone from previous weeks of only being a few percent to now in the 15-17% range and staying there. Because of this the load average is also out of the preferred range as well.

I had this problem on another host recently, and was moved to another physical host - CPU steal went to 0 immediately and hasn't been a problem since. The new machine was pretty much empty.

My program is time-sensitive so it's key to not miss CPU cycles, I'm always trying to keep my load average less than 0.7 (normalised) - so just wondering, what would you consider an acceptable level of CPU steal for a VPS? Is there any kind of virtualisation technology where CPU steal isn't possible at all?

Thanks

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Comments

  • WebProjectWebProject Host Rep, Veteran

    Have you got dedicated cores on your VM or shared?

    Thanked by 1MrH
  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    You hit 10%+ open a Ticket and request them to check on the Node or/and migration.
    You expect them to monitor the nodes, I am sure most of them do however due to the pricing might be only if you complain you get it fixed.

    Thanked by 3fixxation MrH hanoi
  • Expectation should be 0% steal unless your own vps is restricted.

  • @WebProject said:
    Have you got dedicated cores on your VM or shared?

    Pretty sure they would be shared cores.

  • 0,.. %

    Thanked by 1fixxation
  • notarobonotarobo Member
    edited July 2021

    steal average <5.0% if Black Friday Cheap VPS.

    <1% if lowend VPS.

  • I think I need to write in another ticket. It's consistently over 10% (and sometimes as much as 20%) over the past week so this is really starting to affect the performance of my program.

  • JabJabJabJab Member
    edited July 2021

    Probably a time to yell at contabo for me :D

    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              22.34    0.00    8.86    0.73   29.92   38.15
    
  • @JabJab said:
    Probably a time to yell at contabo for me :D

    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              22.34    0.00    8.86    0.73   29.92   38.15
    

    you get what you pay :D :D :D

    still acceptable,, right ?

  • JabJabJabJab Member
    edited July 2021

    @pedagang said: you get what you pay

    Yes.

    @pedagang said: still acceptable,, right ?

    No. I know that contabo is cheap af, iops limited, support on OVH levels (or even worse tbh, OVH straight out ignore you, contabo play dumb), but you expect them to monitor things like that - one day... sure. Two days - over weekend? Maybe, it's cheap, weekend salary is expensive.
    This is avg for last 7 days so no, not accaptable.

  • I don't feel so bad now :#

  • maximize RAM usage to reduce CPU
    such as varnish and other cache
    longer execution time in php and web server
    maybe
    contabo still ok

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    Well, in the end, it depends what you do and how much it is.

    Anything that gets directly impacted by it, Webservers not so much, but for example in my use case, forwarding network traffic, it does impact it, measurable.

    I can see on the local smokeping, that the machine despite 1% cpu load is having a hard time with the cpu steal.

    Thanked by 1Cybr
  • JabJabJabJab Member

    Guess who got migrated.

  • @JabJab said:
    Guess who got migrated.

    Nice. What's your avg steal at now? This is Contabo isn't it?

  • JabJabJabJab Member
    edited July 2021
    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              19.02    0.00    7.12    0.44    4.42   69.00
    

    But this is for like 1.5 hour of running.
    Yes, contabo, cheap thing.

  • @JabJab said:
    Yes, contabo, cheap thing.

    and world wide stable network ?


  • That is my contabo machine xD 35+% cpu steal

  • so .. contabo expensive price... right ?
    :D :D :D

  • jerry_mejerry_me Member
    edited July 2021

    @pedagang said:

    @JabJab said:
    Probably a time to yell at contabo for me :D

    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              22.34    0.00    8.86    0.73   29.92   38.15
    

    you get what you pay :D :D :D

    still acceptable,, right ?

    BF-2020 AMS $6.4/yr

    Wg6rxx.png
    Wgon4f.png

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    Smokeping before and after migration, Gcorelabs Moscow

  • The provider I was having trouble did address the issue - but only for 24 hours I or so. CPU steal dropped to about 2% for the past day, now it's back to about 12% - they say nothing can be done about it, and that I can try another server and see if I'm lucky enough to find a less busy one. :neutral: I think this is grounds to move host...? I'm fine with a couple percent CPU steal but this 12% business is just too much for my application. I have a small VPS with Linode and the CPU steal is at 0 nearly all the time. Anyone know any VPS hosts in Germany that don't oversell their resources and have competitive pricing?

  • JamesFJamesF Member, Host Rep

    How can you measure cpu steel on a live DA VPS please?

  • seriesnseriesn Member
    edited July 2021

    @fixxation said:
    The provider I was having trouble did address the issue - but only for 24 hours I or so. CPU steal dropped to about 2% for the past day, now it's back to about 12% - they say nothing can be done about it, and that I can try another server and see if I'm lucky enough to find a less busy one. :neutral: I think this is grounds to move host...? I'm fine with a couple percent CPU steal but this 12% business is just too much for my application. I have a small VPS with Linode and the CPU steal is at 0 nearly all the time. Anyone know any VPS hosts in Germany that don't oversell their resources and have competitive pricing?

    If Netherland works, come check out EntryBytes.com boss :)

    Thanked by 1fixxation
  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited July 2021

    It should be less than 5% all the time, ideally less than 2%. Very high CPU steal usually means the provider is overloading that node and they don't have enough CPU power to handle the number of guests running on it.

    @JamesF said:
    How can you measure cpu steel on a live DA VPS please?

    It appears in top as the st value, and in vmstat as the st header.

    It's the 8th field in /proc/stat for the cpu lines - this is documented in the proc(5) man page: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html. All tools that read it get the data from /proc/stat.

  • JabJabJabJab Member
    edited July 2021
    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              21.98    0.00    7.11    0.36    3.54   67.01
    
    $ uptime
     21:38:40 up 2 days, 14:24,  1 user,  load average: 2.39, 1.85, 1.78
    

    Not bad for @contabo_m after they moved me to other node. Still seeing odd 10% or something from time to time, but this is how shared works and I can live with that.

    Same things running almost same conditions.

    Thanked by 1bruh21
  • JabJabJabJab Member

    @HBAndrei always forget to tag you - is there any chance for steal in Server Monitoring Agent on the cpu graphs? :) I know VPS's are probably not the most lucrative clients, but still could be helpful from time to time :-)

  • skorupionskorupion Member, Host Rep

    @JabJab said:

    avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
              21.98    0.00    7.11    0.36    3.54   67.01
    
    $ uptime
     21:38:40 up 2 days, 14:24,  1 user,  load average: 2.39, 1.85, 1.78
    

    Not bad for @contabo_m after they moved me to other node. Still seeing odd 10% or something from time to time, but this is how shared works and I can live with that.

    Same things running almost same conditions.

    Thats still pretty high, I'm on a underloaded node on contabo probably:

    10:11:42 PM  CPU    %usr   %nice    %sys %iowait    %irq   %soft  %steal  %guest  %gnice   %idle
    10:11:42 PM  all    0.31    0.01    0.19    0.03    0.00    0.01    0.07    0.00    0.00   99.38
    

    Plus someone accidentally enabled inside virt for me lol

  • JabJabJabJab Member

    @skorupion said: Thats still pretty high, I'm on a underloaded node on contabo probably:

    No, your CPU usage is almost zero [%usr 0.31] (you are and idler, perfect client!) and there is just not enough CPU demand to even get into 'steal' part - you demand almost 0 CPU, host node is not having problem with allocating that to you. More steal will show up with more CPU usage :-)

  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited July 2021

    @JabJab said: Still seeing odd 10% or something from time to time, but this is how shared works and I can live with that.

    Depends on how many VPSes the host cram onto a single server :) I only get >3% with one particular provider, all the others are usually less than 1% apart from spikes, and this includes small NAT VPSes too

    On a HostHatch VPS in particular, I'm using ~15-20% CPU constantly and the steal% is almost always below 0.3%. On a BuyVM VPS, I'm also using ~20% CPU constantly and the steal% is usually 0.7 to 0.9% (I was genuinely surprised that HostHatch's older E5-2680 v2 servers have less CPU steal than BuyVM's new Ryzen 3900X servers)

    Thanked by 1_MS_
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