[support] CPU usage

[Daniel Carrera]

Steve Power wrote:
> If you're servicing all the schools in kent, then maybe the figures are 
> real.

I'm not really. I don't know how many schools we have in Kent. For all I 
know, it could just be this one school. For one school, I would expect 
at *MOST* 100 simultaneous users, but more likely 30 (one classroom).

How many HTTP connections would 30 kids using a website generate? I have 
no real sense of proportion here...


> But tbh, you're barking up the wrong tree.  Dont take this the 
> wrong way, but you need to run this like a popular e-commerce site, not 
> a hobby site.

We would not have moved to UH if we saw this as a hobby site. In any 
case, I do expect to scale up the service as our needs increase. I just 
would like to have a better understanding of what our needs actually are 
(e.g. is 500 connections reasonable?).


> If you have thousands of users then shared hosting is no 
> longer appropriate and just wont scale as their business model relies on 
> lots of inactive websites.

I think we have about 2,000 users on the Drupal site or so. The large 
majority are inactive. Would you guess that kind of site merits a 
dedicated server?

As I've said earlier, UH does not over-sell their resources (e.g. disk 
space and bandwidth). So the comment about their business model, while 
not wrong, is less true for this particular host than you might think.

>  Even if you could move hosts,  its not 
> really going help however you configure Drupal as the problem seems to 
> be at an edge traffic shaping device. Thats only my opinion tho. 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Daniel.