When I ran into this issue in EC2, it was mitigated by leaving cpu0 relatively idle. All apache processes were marked as taskset -c 1-7, the cpu steal and syst

When I ran into this issue in EC2, it was mitigated by leaving cpu0 relatively idle. All apache processes were marked as taskset -c 1-7, the cpu steal and system load went down massively once that was in place.