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Normal CPU steal in VPS
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Normal CPU steal in VPS

LampardLampard Member, Patron Provider
edited June 2019 in General

Hello,

What's normal CPU steal in a VPS?
Currently using Contabo and there's average CPU steal of 8%, and then it also touches 30%-50% in peak time. They call it normal in VPS.

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Comments

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    @Lampard said:
    Hello,

    What's normal CPU steal in a VPS?
    Currently using Contabo and there's average CPU steal of 8%, and then it also touches 30%-50% frequently. They call it normal in VPS.

    I call it change the provider.
    Rumors say if you get 10% or more, it does impact the overall performance.

    I suggest, dropping that oversold peace of shit and get a decent one.

    Thanked by 2Lampard AlwaysSkint
  • 30%-50% ??? Shit, I feel angry when one of my machines touches 5% sporadically...

  • about tree fiddy

  • Your vps is probably on an oversold dedicated server. I suggest you get another vps provider. There are decent providers on this forum.

  • ITLabsITLabs Member

    Move out my man.

  • OujiOuji Member

    Sorry foir being (and sounding) noobish. But what is CPU steal and how can I "see" it happening?

    Thanked by 1hjlow
  • Lampard said: What's normal

    If the VPS is fast enough for your needs, then you can consider that everything is "normal"! There is no "normality": if you are OK to pay peanuts and have very low i/o and CPU there are plenty of hosts for whom this is "normal" and if that fits with your use case it's great (you save money, they oversell as much as they can).

    Ouji said: how can I "see" it happening?

    Using "top".

  • LeonDynamicLeonDynamic Member
    edited June 2019

    @Ouji said:
    Sorry foir being (and sounding) noobish. But what is CPU steal and how can I "see" it happening?

    Use the command Top and look in the top right for st - this is the CPU steal

    EDIT: Sorry @datanoise just notice your response after I posted.

  • LampardLampard Member, Patron Provider
    edited June 2019

    @Neoon said:

    @Lampard said:
    Hello,

    What's normal CPU steal in a VPS?
    Currently using Contabo and there's average CPU steal of 8%, and then it also touches 30%-50% frequently. They call it normal in VPS.

    I call it change the provider.
    Rumors say if you get 10% or more, it does impact the overall performance.

    I suggest, dropping that oversold peace of shit and get a decent one.

    I am thinking about getting a Hetzner cloud. Even sometimes when there's 4% CPU steal i see high load spikes, from 0.10 to 1.4.

    No idea what has happened to Contabo, one year ago it was so good and normal. I also noticed that the CPU Steal significantly increased since one week.

  • IonSwitch_StanIonSwitch_Stan Member, Host Rep

    CPU steal is a co-scheduling contention problem -- meaning that two jobs asked to use the same resource at the same time and they could not be both scheduled, or on a multicore system that there were more jobs than cores.

    One side effect of "cheap VPS" is shared resources. Additionally for anyone patching for the series of Intel exploits, they have lost CPU capacity (disabled hyperthreading). CPU steal simply means that your provider is both , overselling the host, and the users of that system are using that resource.

    Is it bad? It only depends if its impacting you, or you can get a better deal someplace else. When you see folks seriously overselling hosts, CPU steal is the clear indicator.

    Thanked by 2Lampard Ouji
  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    The issue with VPS's, that CPU is mostly shared.
    BUT if the Provider does not oversell the node, you will likely see no steal to maybe 1-2%.

    Fact is, Steal affects your performance of any applications you run on the vps.
    On these Cloud providers, it may change a lot, depending on the node and what/when is deployed on these.

    5% will I guess likely not noticeable but sure measurable.
    But if you get into 10% or even 30%, definitely change the provider.

    Thanked by 1umi
  • LampardLampard Member, Patron Provider
    edited June 2019

    @Neoon said:
    The issue with VPS's, that CPU is mostly shared.
    BUT if the Provider does not oversell the node, you will likely see no steal to maybe 1-2%.

    Fact is, Steal affects your performance of any applications you run on the vps.
    On these Cloud providers, it may change a lot, depending on the node and what/when is deployed on these.

    5% will I guess likely not noticeable but sure measurable.
    But if you get into 10% or even 30%, definitely change the provider.

    It gets high at peak time. Most of the time it is in the range of 0.1%-8%

  • atomiatomi Member

    I have one Netcup VPS with around 40% steal in the last 24hours which is a bit surprise since others have barely 2%. Luckily I've already cancelled that stealing VPS

  • I saw 60% on a Yearly deal I picked up yesterday.
    I'll ignore it if it doesn't really bottleneck my pending wireguard setup for 50-80mbps sustained

  • AlwaysSkintAlwaysSkint Member
    edited June 2019

    The hypervisor appears to affect steal; even between KVM implementations. I've had vmware for a decade that displayed zero steal, all the time, qemu showing less than 0.5% all the time, as well as KVM peaking at 1.5%, with a 'regular' 0.5% or less. Low steal may be inevitable with some implementations. Can't say I remember noticing anything alarming on a xenserver that I had from Smarthost, though it was only a fallback VPS that I didn't monitor closely.
    OpenVZ/Xen PV - forget even looking into it.. it'll make you sad, unless everyone is idling.
    All IME/IMHO. YMMV, as they say.

  • MrHMrH Member

    This is from the ovh's ssd 1

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    0 to 1%

    The only exception is if e.g. your VPS plan said "1 CPU core @ 2.0 GHz", and you get placed on a 3.2 GHz CPU node. Then you can have tens of % to compensate for the difference.

  • edfoxedfox Member

    Iostat says 0.00% steal on my Wishosting server. Is it reading wrong or what?

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited June 2019

    edfox said: Iostat says 0.00% steal on my Wishosting server. Is it reading wrong or what?

    Try doing something on the server, steal appears and increases proportionally with the amount of the actual CPU load that you place on the VPS. E.g. start "dd if=/dev/zero | md5sum" in one SSH session, and then check steal in another.

  • edfoxedfox Member

    @rm_ said:
    Try doing something on the server, steal appears and increases proportionally with the amount of the actual CPU load that you place on the VPS. E.g. start "dd if=/dev/zero | md5sum" in one SSH session, and then check steal in another.

    All cores at 100% using stress-ng. However...

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran

    edfox said: All cores at 100% using stress-ng. However...

    This is on KVM, not OVZ or LXC?

  • edfoxedfox Member

    @rm_ said:

    This is on KVM, not OVZ or LXC?

    Yes, KVM.

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited June 2019

    edfox said: Yes, KVM.

    Then maybe it's just super-non-oversold, empty node. Try also checking in "top", not iostat, in case there's some display difference between them. Since I have a bit of steal even on VMs running on hosts which have less cores assigned to VMs than there are actual physical cores.

  • edfoxedfox Member

    @rm_ said:

    edfox said: Yes, KVM.

    Then maybe it's just super-non-oversold, empty node. Try also checking in "top", not iostat, in case there's some display difference between them. Since I have a bit of steal even on VMs running on hosts which have less cores assigned to VMs than there are actual physical cores.

    Top doesn't seem to have the steal display. Perhaps it's an Alpine thing

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited June 2019

    edfox said: Perhaps it's an Alpine thing

    And maybe the kernel is compiled with(out) some options, so that it's not properly detected for you. I'm not sure which exactly, but maybe some of these, do you have these same set as "=y"?

    $ grep ACCO /boot/config-4.14.128-rm1+ 
    CONFIG_TICK_CPU_ACCOUNTING=y
    # CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN is not set
    # CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING is not set
    CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING=y
    CONFIG_HAVE_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN=y
    CONFIG_HAVE_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y
    # CONFIG_PARAVIRT_TIME_ACCOUNTING is not set
    Thanked by 1vimalware
  • edfoxedfox Member

    @rm_ said:

    edfox said: Perhaps it's an Alpine thing

    And maybe the kernel is compiled with(out) some options, so that it's not properly detected for you. I'm not sure which exactly, but maybe some of these, do you have these same set as "=y"?

    $ grep ACCO /boot/config-4.14.128-rm1+ 
    > CONFIG_TICK_CPU_ACCOUNTING=y
    > # CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN is not set
    > # CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING is not set
    > CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING=y
    > CONFIG_HAVE_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN=y
    > CONFIG_HAVE_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y
    > # CONFIG_PARAVIRT_TIME_ACCOUNTING is not set
    404:~$ grep ACCO /boot/config-vanilla 
    CONFIG_TICK_CPU_ACCOUNTING=y
    # CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN is not set
    CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y
    CONFIG_TASK_IO_ACCOUNTING=y
    CONFIG_HAVE_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING_GEN=y
    CONFIG_HAVE_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y
    # CONFIG_PARAVIRT_TIME_ACCOUNTING is not set

    Almost looks like yours.

  • LampardLampard Member, Patron Provider

    So Contabo just fixed it now, they moved me to another server. The performance became so better and CPU steal is now around 0.1 and sometimes even 0.

  • edited June 2020

    Does this graph normal?

    First spike is runnng dd if=/dev/zero | md5sum for 80 seconds
    Second and third spike are running bench.monster

    Edit:
    Sorry necropost, I thought last reply were June 2020.. lol

  • 50% max steal? If I said to my customers that this is a normal percentage. No one would ever buy products anymore :D I aim to be under 3-5%.

    Thanked by 1AlwaysSkint
  • edufeduf Member
    edited June 2020

    my @PhotonVPS have more than 80% steal, not only got steal on cpu... :s

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