Posts Tagged ‘xen’

What is ’steal time’ in my sysstat output?

After running sar on my new slice from SliceHost*, I noticed a new column called steal. It’s generally very low on my virtual machine, and I’ve never seen it creep over 1-2%.
IBM’s definition of steal time is actually pretty good:
Steal time is the percentage of time a virtual CPU waits for a real CPU [...]