The CPU or Central Processing Unit of a server is responsible for executing instructions and performing calculations for the operating system and applications running on the VPS. One of the main features of VPS is the ability to monitor and control your CPU usage.
There are times when a great amount of processing power is demanded, and CPU cores present a surge in usage:
These surges are normal, especially when the server is performing intensive tasks or experiences a higher-than-usual workload. However, maintaining high CPU usage is not common for balanced and stable systems.
For this reason, and in order to ensure service stability for all our clients, our internal systems will detect if your VPS sustains high CPU usage for longer than 180 minutes. Once this limit is exceeded, our internal systems will consider your VPS compromised. If this happens, your VPS CPU capacity will be decreased automatically by 25% per hour as a protection measure.
We recommend monitoring CPU usage to ensure it is under limits at all times, as well as choosing a plan with more resources whenever possible in order to allow room for unexpected spikes in usage. This helps ensure the VPS remains responsive and performs well even under heavy workloads.
To manage and kill processes using CLI monitoring tools, both top and htop offer direct ways to terminate problematic processes. In top, find the process ID (PID) of the offending process, then press k, and input the PID followed by the signal you want to send (default is 15 for a graceful stop). In htop, simply navigate to the process using the arrow keys, press F9 (kill), and select the signal type.
In the VPS dashboard, you can remove the CPU limit once per week in order to test and make configuration adjustments to the software running inside your VPS.
If your VPS is consistently using a high amount of CPU resources after you have applied optimization measures and ensured your server is free of malware, it may indicate that your project has outgrown your current plan – in that case, you can consider upgrading your VPS.
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