Resource Isolation and Noisy Neighbors
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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
- Identify offender (pidstat/iostat/top, container stats).
- Throttle or evict offender workload.
- Move critical workloads to isolated nodes/pools.
- 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.