<p>I am using Rancher. I have deployed a cluster with 1 master &amp; 3 worker nodes.
All Machines are VPSes with 2 vCPU, 8GB RAM and 80GB SSD.</p>

<p>After the cluster was set up, the CPU reserved figure on Rancher dashboard was 15%.  After metrics were enabled, I could see CPU used figures too and now CPU reserved had become 44% and CPU used was 16%. I find those figures too high. Is it normal for Kubernetes a cluster to consume this much CPU by itself?</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/YcFb9.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/YcFb9.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/kspQt.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/kspQt.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

<p>Drilling down into the metrics, if find that the networking solution that Rancher uses - Canal - consumes almost 10% of CPU resources. Is this normal?</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/PRFH6.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/PRFH6.png" alt="enter image description here"></a>
<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/nChGs.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/nChGs.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

<p>Rancher    v2.3.0
User Interface  v2.3.15
Helm    v2.10.0-rancher12
Machine     v0.15.0-rancher12-1</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fne9L.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/fne9L.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>

<p>This "issue" is known for some time now and it affects smaller clusters. Kuberenetes is very CPU hungry relative to small clusters and this is currently by design. I have found multiple threads reporting this for different kind of setups. <a href="https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/2601" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here</a> is an example.</p>

<p>So the short answer is: yes, Kubernetes setup consumes these amounts of CPU when used with relative small clusters.</p>

<p>I hope it helps.</p>
