INFRA-DEVOPS Contents

Resource Isolation and Noisy Neighbors

Contain noisy neighbors with isolation: cgroups, quotas, and placement to protect critical workloads.

On this page

Noisy Neighbor Symptoms

  • Latency spikes without obvious CPU saturation.
  • Intermittent timeouts correlated with other workloads.
  • Disk or network contention shared across tenants.

Confirm Contention

# CPU run queue and iowait signals
vmstat 1 5
iostat -xz 1 5 2>/dev/null || true

Containment Options

  • CPU: cgroups quotas/shares; pin critical workloads.
  • Memory: limits + OOM policy; protect node from global OOM.
  • I/O: isolate disks; throttle with cgroup io controller (where supported).

cgroups Quick View

# cgroup v2 common
mount | grep cgroup2 || true
cat /sys/fs/cgroup/cgroup.controllers 2>/dev/null || true

Operational Playbook

  1. Identify offender (pidstat/iostat/top, container stats).
  2. Throttle or evict offender workload.
  3. Move critical workloads to isolated nodes/pools.
  4. Add guardrails (quotas/limits) to prevent recurrence.

Failure Modes

  • Throttling surprise: limits too low cause self-inflicted brownouts.
  • Shared disk: one backup job saturates device; all services degrade.