This is a story from around six years ago, when I was given a virtual machine host on a server by the IT guy and he was a little perplexed that I actually used it... A LOT. But we also found something out about the way his session management worked.
The host machine was some Dell server with a pair of Xeon E5 class processors, I don't know what they actually were, for I only saw a very limited guest virtual machine.
My virtual machine was some debian based distro, I think Ubuntu, but running gnome not Wayland. because we were working on some gnome hosted front end.
Anyway, the machine was a continuous integration machine, and I immediately set to making it build the software every time there was a commit to the repo and also to build it overnight and give us a daily build and smoke test.
The problem? Well, this was quite a lot of work. I'd been provisioned to use two cores on the host machine and I basically maxed them out, building the whole system software and then overnight building the whole toolchain and then the system and packaging it after running a series of intense tests basically took 100% CPU for about 3 hours.
And the IT manager was a little befuddled quite what was going on when he kept getting told there was massive activity on his machines overnight.
He wondered about hackers, or some vulnerability which had let them in, of course being a windows guy and the host being windows he just blamed Linux, and I sat pondering the problem and then simply asked "Do you know what the machine is being asked to do?"
And I showed him on my workstation, which was 8 cores and 32GB of RAM... and he blanched at the amount of work... "You're only building software, why does it max out the CPU for that long?"
The lesson? Don't skimp on your continuous integration!
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