Question

What percentage of CPU steal is consider normal/acceptable?

Often a CPU steal in my droplets. And when I contact support, they are willing to do a live migration, and remind me that I’m on a shared CPU plan. I understand the droplet is on the shared CPU hypervisor and will not have CPU stability. And I agree with some CPU steals sometimes (with low percentage, like 10% - 15%). But sometimes I’m having between 40% and 60% CPU steal. I think it is a little abusive.

I’ve read the documentation, but couldn’t find anything about it. So my doubt is. What percentage of CPU steal is consider normal/acceptable for these cases on shared CPU plans?


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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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October 19, 2022

Hello,

With a shared CPU Droplet, the amount of CPU cycles available for the hypervisor to allocate depends on the workload of the other Droplets sharing that host.

If these neighboring Droplets have a high load, a Droplet could receive fractions of hyperthreads instead of dedicated access to the underlying physical processors.

In practice, this means that shared CPU Droplets can have access to full hyperthreads, but it’s not guaranteed.

DigitalOcean are constantly monitoring for any abusive behavior and would take action if a specific user is using too much CPU, eg. in the case of mining for example.

If you want to have guaranteed CPU power it is best to consider a CPU-optimized Droplet.

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby

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