What does a high percentage of standing time (st) in top for Linux mean, and what could it be related to?

In top in Linux, the st (steal time) parameter shows the percentage of time that a virtual machine was waiting while the hypervisor allocated CPU time to it. A high st percentage indicates that the virtual machine is not getting enough CPU due to contention with other virtual machines on the host.

Reasons for high st:

• Overloading the host server with virtualization (too many VMs on a single physical CPU).
• Insufficient CPU resources allocated to the virtual machine.
• Incorrect hypervisor or scheduler configuration.

This signals that the virtual machine is idle, waiting for CPU, and performance may suffer. To resolve this, reduce the load on the host, redistribute resources, or optimize virtualization configuration.