Server Performance Lacking

I've recently noticed that my site 'Carbon360' which is hosted by Dreamhost seems to be getting slower.
It seems to take a long time for even simple php operations.

Is there anyway I can benchmark the server? Or anywhere where Dreamhost report on server-performance?

I don't believe it's my code, but I would be happy to see any advice. The site is all php and mysql - are there any particular functions known to be slow?

Thanks in advance, J

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Lead Web Dev,

In reply to:
The site is all php and mysql - are there any particular functions known to be slow?

Anything that relies heavily on regex is usually a bit slow. Also, anything to do with creating/resampling images. On the whole, I have found the performance of DreamHost servers to be excellent.

In reply to:
support Carbon-Emitting companies

How does a company emit carbon exactly? Does it vomit coal or diamonds into the air, or something? Since when did carbon dioxide get abbreviated to just carbon?

thanks for the first half of your reply.

re the second half, I didn't write the copy, but will pass on your comment.

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Lead Web Dev,

In reply to:
re the second half, I didn't write the copy, but will pass on your comment.

It's no big deal. It is just that I've noticed an increase in this sort of thing recently, and I believe it can be a little misleading. It's a bit like all this "low in sodium" stuff, when they should be saying "low in salt".

Your site's actually pretty fast for me right now.

I'd had speed problems a few months back when I first set up my account, but things have gotten quite a bit quicker since then.

-Scott

In reply to:
Does it vomit coal or diamonds into the air, or something?

Hehe, I doubt there would be too many complaints regarding the latter. :)

As for the site, it seems quite fast here too.

Mark

Hi,

I've also noticed the slowness. I googled a bit online and I found this one comment:
http://www.squarefree.com/2005/03/13/switching-from-movable-type-to-wordpress/#comment-1068

If you're too lazy to click the link, here is the comment itself:
"Your slow-downs may not only be due to WordPress, but that DreamHost has quite substantial performance problems with their MySQL servers at the moment. Having just bought an account with them, before switching I’ve been benchmarking their database performance (open a connection, then perform 4 different queries on a datbase table of ~9MB):

http://nontroppo.dreamhosters.com/temp/dbtest2.php

my old host (who suffer from awful support and bad management of servers) using the identical test:

http://nontroppo.org/temp/dbtest.php

So far, there is a massive difference; in initiating a connection I get a mean latency of some 125ms+-1456ms standard deviation (n=2021 — my old host is about 4.5ms), it is as if the server is across the Atlantic (125ms is the hop from LA to London!), and then queries are about 3-10x slower. These values hold on at least two of the DreamHost MySQL servers.

I am collating statistics over a few days and will submit it as a report to them, I’ve heard they are good about responding to such input positively. Anyway I suspect the “slowdown” could be drastically reduced once DreamHost get a handle on their poor MySQL performance. "

... and I went to both of his mysql query benchmarking scripts. And yes, he was right, mysql does seem to be terribly slow on dreamhost. The four queries range from 80 to 140 milliseconds on DreamHost, but 1 to 14 milliseconds for the commenter's previous hosting provider.

This is pretty ridiculous. I hope that this gets fixed right away before I start to change my mind about this hosting... The lag on my wordpress blog is starting to get quite annoying.

Thanks,
~vsergeev

Sorry, the 80-140 ms was just my first time, after refreshing a bit I saw around 20-70ms query times. The other host was still usually around 1-20ms...

So far this is the only setback I've encountered with DreamHost (other than the relatively slow control panel as well, but that's separate from the actual hosting).

But even these forums are laggy for me.