You can make sure that people get a fair CPU share without resorting to such primitive (and wrong) methods. Xen has the ability to cap CPU usage with either ha

You can make sure that people get a fair CPU share without resorting to such primitive (and wrong) methods. Xen has the ability to cap CPU usage with either hard or soft caps. Most VPS companies seem to use soft caps. That way, if there are 4 instances on the box and each is doing lots of stuff, they'll each get 25%. But if 3 of the instances are mostly idle not using CPU, but one needs more CPU it will be able to use extra. It works out really nicely because it means that your usage can burst at certain times when it's unlikely that your co-habitants are similarly bursting. See: http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#cpu-scheduling http://www.slicehost.com/questions/#cpu-scheduling