Anyone else notice Windows VPS hosting gets weird under normal load?
Posted by Prestigious-Bath8022@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 7 comments
This is what’s confusing me. We’re not even doing anything heavy. Basic NET app + SQL connection + a couple scheduled tasks. But on Windows VPS hosting the performance just randomly dips like the box is overloaded even when it clearly isn’t.
Checked CPU steal time. Checked disk I/O. Nothing obvious. Feels like noisy neighbor stuff but support always says dedicated resources which ok.
Tried tuning registry, power settings, background services etc on Windows VPS hosting. Still happens. At this point I’m just trying to understand if this is expected behavior or if I should be looking elsewhere entirely.
Any sysadmins actually running stable Windows VPS hosting long term?
WDWKamala@reddit
You’re IO starved.
Prestigious-Bath8022@reddit (OP)
That was my first guess too but the numbers don’t fully back it up. Still feels like something is choking.
WDWKamala@reddit
What numbers? Most people don’t know their IOP ceiling.
MSgtGunny@reddit
What numbers are you checking? Are you looking at your io load of the io queue depth/latency of your io requests? A VPS is shared hardware so you can get crap latency even on low load from you because other tenants have high load.
eu_licensing_pro@reddit
Seen this a few times. Metrics look fine, but short I/O spikes don’t always show up unless you’re watching latency over time.
Most of the time it ended up being noisy neighbor / shared storage, even when provider claimed “dedicated”.
Hairy-Scar-9390@reddit
This is expected tbh. Windows VPS hosting is just harder to run stable than Linux because the OS itself is way heavier. Your normal load might be fine but Windows is doing a million things in the background you dont see.
Three things to check right now. Disable all startup programs you don't absolutely need. Go into services msc and set everything non critical to Manual instead of Automatic. Check your antivirus exclusions and make sure your app directories are excluded.
The random dips usually happen when Windows decides to do maintenance or updates or defender scans. You can schedule all that stuff for off hours but it takes registry editing to fully lock it down.
Bacloud has pretty solid uptime on their Windows VPS plans from what I've read.
jess-sch@reddit
First guess: I/O
Second guess: Nested Virtualization tanks performance and if your VPS supports nested virtualization Windows will use virtualization-based security features. The flag needs to be disabled in hypervisor's VM settings.