VPS slow on some days: CPU steal and noisy neighbours
Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2026 8:12 am
Same VPS, same EA, same broker, and still some weeks the fills feel sluggish and the terminal lags during busy minutes. Before blaming the broker, consider that the VPS itself may not give a constant amount of CPU.
Cheap plans often oversubscribe the host. Several virtual machines share the same physical cores, and when a neighbour gets busy, the guest waits for its turn. On Linux this appears as CPU steal; on Windows guests it is harder to see, because Task Manager just shows a calm CPU while everything runs slower than it should.
A way to catch it: run a small fixed benchmark script, a loop that does the same arithmetic for a set number of iterations, every five minutes for a week, and log the time each run takes. On a stable plan the times cluster tightly. If some runs take twice as long at certain hours, the host is the cause, and that rhythm can be compared against bad-fill periods in the trade log.
Also worth knowing: closing the remote desktop window leaves the session running, but a session that is left connected with heavy visuals and a huge screen resolution uses more resources than one that is disconnected cleanly.
Which kind of plan, shared or dedicated cores, has delivered the most stable timings so far?
Cheap plans often oversubscribe the host. Several virtual machines share the same physical cores, and when a neighbour gets busy, the guest waits for its turn. On Linux this appears as CPU steal; on Windows guests it is harder to see, because Task Manager just shows a calm CPU while everything runs slower than it should.
A way to catch it: run a small fixed benchmark script, a loop that does the same arithmetic for a set number of iterations, every five minutes for a week, and log the time each run takes. On a stable plan the times cluster tightly. If some runs take twice as long at certain hours, the host is the cause, and that rhythm can be compared against bad-fill periods in the trade log.
Also worth knowing: closing the remote desktop window leaves the session running, but a session that is left connected with heavy visuals and a huge screen resolution uses more resources than one that is disconnected cleanly.
Which kind of plan, shared or dedicated cores, has delivered the most stable timings so far?