When other virtual machines on the same physical server use a lot of network or CPU, your server’s processing gets delayed at irregular times.
Why Other VMs on the same physical server use a lot of resources → Effect Packet processing on your VM is delayed at irregular times → On screen Occasional jitter (variation in packet arrival times) with no obvious cause, showing up as stutter
Primary owner Infra team (Server infrastructure) · Also External (External)
Infra team action items
Use dedicated hosts or instances with guaranteed performance, stop and restart instances with persistent jitter to move them to another host.
External action items
Report the problem host to the cloud provider.
On the graph
Random spikes · Round-trip jitter within the data center, %steal
Where to look
Ping another server in the same data center continuously to record round-trip jitter, and compare it, along with %steal from mpstat, against other instances with the same configuration
Confirmed if
Only this instance shows irregular spikes in round-trip jitter or %steal, while others with the same configuration stay quiet. Stopping and restarting it to move it to another host makes the problem go away
Ruled out if
All instances with the same configuration spike the same way: not a host problem. Look at game server load or the network path