mikeb: steal time is the time that the CPU (1) had something runnable, but (2) the hypervisor chose to run something else instead it's like iowait time, except it is time waiting on the physical CPU to become available and yes, Xen isn't the only one to have it s390 has it too and I guess IBM's power boxes, too ahh, ok riel: if there's only one virtual machine running on a box, would you expect steal time to ever get very high (> 50%)? does that virtual machine have more virtual cpus than there are physical cpus on the system? is it a fully virtualized system, with a heavy load on qemu-dm in dom0 ? riel: good question, possibly one virtual cpu can wait on another, and cause steal time