There was recently [a paper][1] published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems where the argument was that if your instance is scheduled out by the hyperviso

There was recently [a paper][1] published in ACM Transactions on Computer Systems where the argument was that if your instance is scheduled out by the hypervisor during TCP traffic, the latency in ACKing packets would reduce the network throughput of instances, because of the slow start mechanism. Given that distributed network rely heavily on network latency and capacity, I found it very interesting to see the effect of busy CPU propagate to slower network IO. [1]: http://friends.cs.purdue.edu/pubs/SC10.pdf http://friends.cs.purdue.edu/pubs/SC10.pdf