CPU Power

Well, you thought wrong. I can usually burst up to 400% when the host is idle.

… and usually even when it's not. CPU is there for the taking… at any given moment, the CPU is either doing productive work, or twiddling its thumbs. Rare is the moment in which it's not twiddling its thumbs.

So, by God, don't feel bad about using the CPU! Embrace the pbzip2! Compile a kernel with -j5; feel the burn! (Note that idle tasks like seti@home or boinc will likely result in less CPU being available for you, so save those for your home/dedicated machines :-)

Best of all, each host machine has 8 cores (800% total), so even if one person bursts to 400%, other people on the host still have plenty of CPU to work with. No more "one person monopolizing all host resources" BS that you often see with OpenVZ providers.

@hoopycat: Last time I checked, it's against Linode's terms of service to deliberately perform highly resource-intensive tasks on your server. So it's not only a bad idea to fold@home with your Linode, it might even be a reason for suspension. Pbzip2 might be okay, though…

Xen is decently tweakable from a resource allocation standpoint, so sustained full-throttle CPU usage will probably get an "is everything OK?" ticket and a decrease in processor priority if required. So, it's definitely to be avoided. However, if pbzip2 is wrong, I don't want to be right ;-)

> Rare is the moment in which it's not twiddling its thumbs.

But aside from sustained CPU usage. Every time, I log into my Linode it's showing the "Host Load" as idle, it's never showing any load for me. Either I'm the only account on my Linode, unlikely, or the other 39ish Linode 360s are similar to me and don't have anything really intensive going on.

Or maybe Xen is tweaked in such a way to give us decent performance but no matter what we did we wouldn't be able to take the server down? I don't know. I just know I'm very happy with Linode. Support is top notch. Staff's technical expertise is top notch. Customer service is top notch. Price is good. I'm happy :)

@waldo:

Every time, I log into my Linode it's showing the "Host Load" as idle, it's never showing any load for me. Either I'm the only account on my Linode, unlikely, or the other 39ish Linode 360s are similar to me and don't have anything really intensive going on.

This may or may not be correct, but I heard that the transition to Xen made "host load" kind of useless. It shows the dom0's load, which isn't affected much by the guests, or something.

That could also explain why I've never seen a load :)

So I've got this script running on my linode that occasionally decides to go nuts and take up 100% of the CPU. I'm having an awful time debugging it…do I need to worry that I'm messing up other people's servers while my script is in an infinite loop, or will Xen throttle my CPU usage automatically to be fair to others?

I'm hoping it's the latter…it's not multithreaded, so it's at worst taking up one CPU, but still…