1st March 2021 By Simon Bennett
You can see CPU steal when using the top command. In the hypervisor world, CPU steal can be seen as the hypervisor limiting your ability to use CPU cycles. In the significantly worse cause, your provider could be overselling there hardware, and the steal is coming from your neighbours sharing the physical hardware.
I noticed from the screenshot that the server was a t3.medium. The T series processes at AWS are sold as burstable instances. They are not designed to be used at max capacity. If your server only sees a high load 20% of the time, it is perfect. At SnapShooter, we make hefty use of them as our ingestion load is very busty. Most people do backups at the hour mark, so our load always peaks for 5-10minutes after every hour. Continue Read