[support] CPU usage

[Cosmo]

If you have shell access to the server you can just run "top" (or I think
also "load") and that will give the machines CPU utilization.

I had a load problem with Dreamhost when then surprised me by moving my
hosting account to a heavily loaded machine. But what made it worse was them
then danced for weeks with excuses while they attempted to find the culprit
on the machine abusing resources. And they never answered the question as to
why they moved me in the first place. So, it fell upon me to run "top"
regularly and emailing support complaining of loads in 100's and even
1000's! (I know the average sys admin says just move to a dedicated machine
and be done with it, but during a ramp up when one can't afford it one must
deal with what they have. Plus, moving a site(s) is no picnic. Note: I am
not recommending Dreamhost any longer because of this. In fact, what I did
was move part of my hosting to Site5 where they guaranteed that server loads
would stay in single digits (which is where it's been since). They even post
their machine loads on their website for anyone to see at any time, which
felt reassuring. The only thing bad I've heard about Site5 is a post where
they cut some guy off at the knees because of server resource abuse and
wouldn't restart his account (at least that was his story, but I'll be he
was warned and chose to do nothing about it. As apposed to the DH approach
of telling the client something like "come on, stop that or we'll... --- and
then do nothing. And I'm only saying this because I can't imagine it's too
hard to figure out what resource is running away and simply killing it - of
course, I'm not a sys admin, and don't care to be, so maybe it's harder than
I think.

Best
Cozzi


-----Original Message-----
From: support-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org]On
Behalf Of Daniel Carrera
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 10:23 AM
To: support at drupal.org
Subject: Re: [support] CPU usage


It would help if I knew what the CPU usage actually was. Perhaps my site
is just very badly configured (e.g. I didn't even have caching enabled).

Also, the problem is not *technically* that I'm hitting a CPU quota.
What happens is that we have a lot of requests coming from the same IP
address (which is used by a number of schools, which are our customers).
So the firewall at the server decides that this IP is mounting a DOS
attack, so it blocks the IP, hence blocking our customers.

I spoke with support, and they said if the CPU usage went down, it would
reduce the chances of that school IP being blocked in the future. And
that's how I ended up here asking about CPU usage.

Cheers,
Daniel.


Steve Power wrote:
> ask them to move you to a less busy machine?
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Daniel Carrera
> <daniel.carrera at theingots.org <mailto:daniel.carrera at theingots.org>>
wrote:
>
>     Greg Knaddison wrote:
>
>         A cheap VPS is $20/month and will likely solve the problem.
>
>
>     I am not a very good sysadmin and I hate sys admin work. I cry at
>     the thought of having to configure Mailman (I have no idea how) or
>     spam filters, or Apache, PHP and MySQL, or handle backup and recovery.
>
>     I speak from experience. I have been the sys admin of a non-critical
>     Drupal site and I know I would not like to do the same for a mission
>     critical site.
>
>     I chose this host as a way to get a balance between getting my fair
>     share of resources while having someone else do the day-to-day admin
>     work that I have neither interest nor aptitude for.
>
>
>
>         Debugging a slow site on shared hosting is an exercise in
futility.
>         Regardless of the value you place on your own time, it doesn't
take
>         much time troubleshooting before a low cost shared hosting plan
>         becomes a false savings.
>
>
>     I did not choose the present shared host based on savings. I chose
>     them because they have the best reputation for excellent support and
>     uptime that is second to none. So far they have lived up to their
>     reputation. My support requests receive an intelligent and useful
>     response in less than 2 or 3 minutes.
>
>     My top priority is reliability. I don't have enough confidence in my
>     admin skills to believe that I can achieve better reliability myself
>     than I can with United Hosting.
>
>     Daniel.
>
>     --
>     [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
>
>
>
> --
> --
> --
> Steve Power
> Principal Consultant
> Mobile: +44 (0) 7747 027 243
> Initsix Technology and Media
> --
>
>
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>
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