High CPU Steal percentage on Amazon EC2 Instance

Posted by Aditya Patawari on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Aditya Patawari
Published on 2012-10-16T10:37:18Z Indexed on 2012/10/16 11:04 UTC
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Filed under:

amazon-ec2

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virtualization

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Performance

I am experiencing high CPU steal percentage in a Amazon EC2 large instance. I know it means that my virtual CPU is waiting on the real CPU of the machine for time. My question is that what can I do to reduce this percentage and get maximum out of the CPU?

Steal percentage is consistently at 20%. System load crosses 10 when this happens. I have checked memory and network and I am sure that they are not the bottleneck. Is that normal for such environment?

Also are there any system level optimization techniques for reducing steal percentage form the virtual instance?

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          52.38    0.00    8.23    0.00   21.21   18.18

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