AVA Hosting Said “No Sharing.” Linux Reported 32.73% CPU Steal
I expected to find a bug in my application. Maybe Node.js was overloaded. Maybe Nginx was queuing requests. Maybe memory was running out. Maybe the disk was stalling. Instead, mpstat showed this: Average CPU steal: 32.73% Average CPU idle: 0.00% That changed the investigation completely. This is not a negative review of AVA Hosting, and I am not claiming that every VPS they operate behaves like…
AVA Hosting's marketing material claims its VPS resources are "guaranteed" and "isolated," with no sharing or CPU steal impacting other customers. However, a real-world test of a KVM VPS running a production workload revealed exactly the opposite. The 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM server showed an average CPU steal time of 32.73% during a 60-second observation period, meaning almost one third of the CPU accounting was being wasted because the hypervisor was not running the virtual CPU.
This large amount of unavailable execution time, combined with a runnable queue that never drained, indicates persistent CPU contention caused by the hypervisor. This contradicts AVA's claims of dedicated resources and elimination of steal time at the hypervisor level. The findings contradict the hosting provider's promises, demonstrating that CPU steal can and does occur even when a customer believes they have an entire virtual CPU core dedicated to their workload.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
