Source: https://gameye.com/glossary/noisy-neighbour/

---
title: "Noisy neighbour | Gameye"
description: "The noisy neighbour problem occurs when one tenant on a shared cloud server consumes excessive CPU, memory, or I/O, degrading performance for other tenants on the same hardware."
---

# Noisy neighbour

The noisy neighbour problem occurs when one tenant on a shared cloud server consumes excessive CPU, memory, or I/O, causing performance degradation for other tenants running on the same physical hardware. This is a fundamental limitation of multi-tenant virtualisation.

## Why it matters for game servers

Game servers are uniquely sensitive to noisy neighbours. A dedicated server running a 128-tick shooter needs consistent CPU every 7.8 milliseconds. If a neighbouring VM spikes CPU usage and steals cycles, the game server’s tick rate stutters. Players experience rubberbanding, desyncs, and missed hit registrations.

This is why competitive and high-tick-rate games overwhelmingly run on bare metal. Dedicated physical hardware means no other tenant can interfere with your game server’s performance.

## Cloud VMs vs bare metal

Cloud VMs (EC2, GCE, Azure VMs) share physical CPUs across tenants. Cloud providers use overcommit ratios — selling more vCPUs than physical cores exist — which makes noisy neighbours inevitable under load. Bare metal servers dedicate every core to your workload exclusively.

Some cloud providers offer “dedicated instances” or “metal instances” that reduce the problem, but at significantly higher cost than purpose-built bare metal game server infrastructure.

Building a multiplayer game? Gameye hosts dedicated game servers: ship your server as a Docker container and start one per match with a single API call, in a region near your players.

[See how it works →](https://gameye.com/how-it-works/)

[Back to Glossary](https://gameye.com/glossary/)

## Related terms

- ### Bare-metal servers

A bare-metal server is a physical machine which lives inside a data centre. It’s a place where you’ll host your games matches and sessions. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/bare-metal-servers/)
- ### Cloud servers

Your cloud server is a virtual server. It runs in a cloud computing environment, and it's a place where you’ll host your games’ matches and sessions. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/cloud-servers/)
- ### Tick rate

Tick rate is how many times per second a game server updates the game state, measured in hertz (Hz). A 64-tick server updates 64 times a second; a 128-tick server, 128. [Read more](https://gameye.com/glossary/tick-rate/)