IBM Cloud Sustained CPU Endurance Run
cx2-2x4 - Aug 22 2020

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The sustained CPU endurance test runs a cpu intensive task in a loop for 24 hours. As maxing out the cpu might be considered abusive, the tests aims to use no more than 50% of each cpu core on the VPS.

The purpose of this type of test is

  • first to evaluate the speed to the VPS,
  • second to evaluate the stability over time of the cpu available to the VPS
  • and third to detect VPS where the CPU is throttled and the performance goes down over time after cpu utilization goes over a threshold the provider considers excessive for a particular plan.

The performance is measured at regular intervals in terms of tasks executed per hour, amount of idle cpu and amount of "cpu steal".

Provider: IBM Cloud
Plan: cx2-2x4
Number of CPU cores: 2
Burstable CPU resources: no
CPU type: Intel Core Processor (Broadwell, IBRS)


DescriptionValue
Target CPU usage Overall CPU that the endurance test tries to use across all CPU cores on the VM. 50%
Average iterations per hour Average number of tasks executed per hour. It represents how much work the VPS was able to achieve per hour. Higher numbers are better. 2195
Coefficient of variation iterations per hour This represents the dispersion of the number of tasks per hour. It's the standard deviation divided by the mean number of tasks per hour. It's an indicator on stability of the performance of the VPS. A low standard deviation means the VPS speed stayed close to constant. A high standard deviation means performance varied significantly during the test. 1.18%
Average CPU idle Average percentage of CPU that was idle during the test. This number should be close to 50% unless the CPU is being throttled like in burstable VPS plans. 49.6%
Min CPU idle Minimum percentage of CPU idle during the test. 44.8%
Average CPU steal Average percentage of CPU steal during the test. Lower is better. 0.06%
Max CPU steal Maximum percentage of CPU steal during the test. 0.54%


Number of tasks completed per hour




Date Number of iterations per hour CPU Idle % CPU Steal %
August 24, 2020 00:00 UTC 2205 55.35 0.12
August 23, 2020 22:00 UTC 2203 48.87 0.12
August 23, 2020 20:00 UTC 2191 49.65 0.05
August 23, 2020 18:00 UTC 2205 49.66 0.05
August 23, 2020 16:00 UTC 2197 49.69 0.05
August 23, 2020 14:00 UTC 2185 49.69 0.05
August 23, 2020 12:00 UTC 2184 49.66 0.06
August 23, 2020 10:00 UTC 2195 49.63 0.05
August 23, 2020 08:00 UTC 2199 49.75 0.05
August 23, 2020 06:00 UTC 2202 49.75 0.05
August 23, 2020 04:00 UTC 2200 49.75 0.04
August 23, 2020 02:00 UTC 2201 49.75 0.05
August 23, 2020 00:00 UTC 2169 49.72 0.05

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