Question

A production application VM on a shared-tenancy public cloud instance is experiencing intermittent performance degradation. The guest OS reports low CPU utilization (around 30%), yet application response times are slow and requests occasionally time out. When you review the hypervisor-level metrics, you notice a consistently high 'CPU steal time' value. What is the MOST likely cause of the degradation?

Accepted Answer

The physical host is oversubscribed and the hypervisor is delaying CPU cycles to this VM while servicing other co-located tenants

Answer

The application has a memory leak that is triggering excessive garbage collection

Answer

The VM's network security group is dropping return traffic, causing retransmissions

Answer

The attached block volume has exceeded its provisioned IOPS limit and is throttling disk reads