I miss when specs were honest

I have observed the following Degradation of Truth in Provider Specifications with increasing Regret over the past five years. Please to consider my current situation with Hetzner:

• Advertised: 1 Dedicated Core
• Actual: 1 vCPU with Burstable Baseline of 10 Percent
• Result: sustained compile job throttled to 0.1 core after 30 seconds

Please to also note the Memory Situation. "1 GB" but the Kernel Samepage Merging and Balloon Driver consume 180 MB before userland begins. This is not 1 GB. This is 820 MB and everyone knows it.

I do not request much. Please to call a Burstable Thread a Burstable Thread. The Euphemism Inflation helps no one. I have filed three Tickets. The Support Department sends the same Copypaste about "shared resources" which I already comprehend.

Please to restore the Plain Language of earlier Eras.

I just bought a "1 core" from OVHcloud for my project and now im worried. Is there a command I can run to see the real specs? Thanks everyone!

Hi Sarah —

Check your actual allocation with:

Cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "MHz"
Sysbench cpu --cpu-max-prime=10000 run

Watch for steep drops after the first minute. If you paid for dedicated, the frequency should hold steady.

We have seen this pattern across the budget market. Some providers are clearer than others. Read the terms of service carefully for words like "fair share" or "best effort."

— Admin

The machines I manage at my employer exhibit this same pattern. The provider in question labels them "dedicated threads" but the underlying silicon is a Xeon E5-2680v4 with 56 threads across 14 cores and they have sold each thread to four separate tenants. Do the mathematics: 3.5 effective machines per physical thread at peak. The contract language permits this via the phrase "up to one logical processor". Semicolons separate clauses but do not separate deception from legality. I have graphs; -- Marcus

Yes this is the classical Oversubscription strategy of the modern HostIndustry, no there is no Regulator to stop it. The DedicatedCore is now a MarketingTerm without Technical meaning, yes I have measured this myself on six Providers. The Steal time metric in top reveals everything if you know where to look. Yes on my CloudCone machine the StealTime jumps to 80Percent during PeakHours, no this is not acceptable for any Workload productionworthy. I have written a 47Page Complaint document with Graphs and measurements, yes perhaps I will publish it on my Blog.