[support] CPU usage

Thu May 14 08:19:39 UTC 2009

Hi Cozzi,

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad someone here understands me :-)

United Hosting is much better than DH (and much more expensive too) as 
they do not over-sell resources and they have good support. Still, they 
are much cheaper than a managed dedicated server.

UH has not moved me to a new server. And *in general* the site works 
fine. It's just this one very important IP that has problems. I am 
hesitant to blame UH because I know that another service (Mailfoundry) 
also tends to block the same IP for a similar-sounding reason.

I have shell access to the server so I can run "top". And every user has 
his own instance of PHP, so I could configure that. But it looks like 
the problem is not with PHP but with MySQL. It is my hope that page 
caching will noticeably lower the number of MySQL requests.

Cheers.

Cosmo wrote:
> 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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