CPU usage on shared hosting.

This past week I was moved over to the limbo-spunky server because my website was beginning to use almost 56 CPU minutes a day. I'm worried now that I may never have my website return to it's original state and provide the same features for my users.

So, I have a few questions that I have to ask here specifically because I couldn't find any kind of answer from the dreamhost wiki.

1. What will it take to get out of limbo? How long do I have to stay until I can continue back to my original server?

2. If I upgrade to a larger more expensive hosting package, how many CPU minutes will I be allocated then? I would like to avoid getting into dedicated hosting, but I will buy a server if it does come to that.

3. Why was I never warned on the limit of CPU minutes I'm granted? I know dreamhost isn't any different from any other host that I know of, but shouldn't I be warned and told how many minutes I'm using up on the server? Is that too much to ask?

Thanks in advance to anyone who replies.

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/CPU_Minutes_FAQ

The Insane Cabbit
My Blog http://www.sounanda.com
My web store:
http://www.marciesgifts.com
Send me a pm if you want cms or forum software installed (for a fee)

heh.

Maybe you didn't read my post all the way through, or maybe you didn't read that wiki article yourself. Oh well. The DH wiki doesn't give me the answers I'm looking for. Believe me, that was the first page I visited when I went to the wiki. Thanks.

Feature request (tongue-in-cheek): put the CPU cap on a similar sliding scale as disk space so that as the years go by, your allowable usage grows. Just like disk and bandwidth, most accounts won't use all they are allowed, but faithful Customers who have stood by DH ups and downs over the years, effectively end up with a dedicated server if they need it :-)

What kind of software were you using? Maybe some of us here may have some experience with it and could offer suggestions to keep your usage down.

>What will it take to get out of limbo?
You'll have to reduce your cpu usage to stay with in accectable ranges. Not sure how long you have to accomplish that - I'm sure dreamhost will give you plenty of warning if they heavn't already covered that info in an E-mail.

>If I upgrade to a larger more expensive hosting package
As far as I know, cpu used is the same for the various shared hosting packages. If you are really using so many resources that you can't cut it back, some add revinue could probably cover dedicated costs. However, keep in mind that DH isn't offering dedicated machines right now.

>Why was I never warned on the limit of CPU minutes I'm granted?
I think you just missed it. A 30-40 cpu limit was put in place some months ago. It was then raised to 50-60 a month or so ago. You can turn on cpu usage reporting for each user, and keep track of it that way. This is dreamhost's way of warning you and letting you know that you're using up too much. Rather than charging you extra for the usage, or just kicking you out, they've been good enough to move you to a different server where you can keep operating your site, while you work on reducing cpu usage.

What you'll want to look into is cuting out extra features of your site that people arn't using or don't need. For instance phpbb forums have a lot of extra junk and tend to be resource hogs. You might consider switching to a friendlier forum like punbb. Pages that have a lot of dynamic content can be he couse of trouble too, if you can see about reworking thoes areas so the server doesn't have to assemble the page before sending it out to the visitor.

Hope this helps.



-Matttail

mattail, thanks for the reassurance and for the suggestion of using the CPU monitor (something I overlooked I guess :p ).

Nathan, what killed me was a php script I was using for myself; but it caught on with more than 1000 unique IPs and now that one script shot me out of the larchmont server. This isn't phpbb or any other service that DH provides on the One-click-install feature. I'm very anxious right now to get myself back up so that I can reap in the opportunity of popularity by throwing up ads like no tomorrow. I'm trying to rewrite my script so that it would run more efficiently, but I think that I may have to upgrade to dedicated hosting soon enough.

Thanks everyone for your replies.

well if dedicated hosting is on the horozion, good for you. You might want to see if it's possible to make your script more robust, at least for now so it takes up less resources. (or limit the number of people who can use it for now)



-Matttail

In reply to:

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heh.

Maybe you didn't read my post all the way through, or maybe you didn't read that wiki article yourself. Oh well. The DH wiki doesn't give me the answers I'm looking for. Believe me, that was the first page I visited when I went to the wiki. Thanks.

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Yes, I did read the page fully before I linked to it. It did answer all of your questions. I think maybe you just skimmed the parts of the article instead of reading through it.

You asked how do you get your account back to the way it use to be, the answer given in the wiki was to figure out what was being such a resource hog and either optimize it or get rid of it.

You asked if you would get more CPU minutes if you upgraded to a more expensive account. The wiki clearly states that shared hosting users should use no more than 50-60 CPU minutes. So you should assume this is talking about ALL shared hosting plans.

You asked why you were not alerted to the amount of CPU minutes that you were using and the wiki clearly stated where you could find resource reports. It is up to us to watch what we are doing, DH merely provides tools that would be useful in that respect.

The Insane Cabbit
My Blog http://www.sounanda.com
My web store:
http://www.marciesgifts.com
Send me a pm if you want cms or forum software installed (for a fee)

I'm on the eval server, used 108 CPU min yesterday. I dropped in a robots.txt file a couple days ago, doesnt seem to help. Would stopping hotlinking reduce CPU min? I'm also wondering if a dedicated server (last resort) would be faster. Note how long it takes to load:

http://themot.org/gallery/v/Cats/Jumper/

Or maybe gallery 1.5 would use fewer min? I could switch back, iirc it was a little faster.

Thanks :)