Terrible performance!

After hearing so many positive comments about DH, I've decided to get an account and try it myself. Two months later, my experience isn't exactly what I was expecting. Some of the offered features are really great; bandwidth, disk space and system software but what about server performance?
Most of the time, server load peaks up to 50%, unacceptably high for a production dynamic website. I tried some small php and perl scripts in my webpages (no MySQL), with really disappointing results. I cannot think using a demanding script like Drupal or similar under these conditions. Tried that for a while but I had to wait 20 – 40 seconds before my website shown.
Some people say that this is a common issue with all shared host service providers. Maybe, but I never encountered such a high load with my other hosts.

I wonder if DH has any future plans for a performance upgrade or better load balance. I do like dreamhost, great system features, nice support, right price. May I ask for just a little more power please?

PS: Please excuse my awful English :)

Your English is fine.
You can improve the power from your end. You need to shorten the flex between you and DreamHost.

--
Norm

Opinions are my own views, not DreamHosts'.
I am NOT a DreamHost employee OK!! mad

You act on my advice at your own risk!

Well I have noticed this as well. I came back to dreamhost and hoped to use their fastcgi support here. However I was severely disappointed at the load time for the fastcgi module. Maybe it is because they are using mod_fastcgi. On my last host I was using mod_fcgid and getting great performance. I might of took 10 seconds to initially load the process but once done the page worked great. Here it can take up to 2 minutes and then it may not load (the one try timed out). I moved back to using straight cgi for now because it is somehow "faster" than fastcgi.

I should note that the last host was a custom configured vps. However it was more than I needed and I couldn't afford it hence why I came back.Edited by shinji on 07/22/06 06:35 AM (server time).

Hmm, DH has to do something with that like decreasing the hosts/server ratio and using better load balance. Multi gigabyte storage and bandwidth availability without acceptable performance, is practically useless for anything but plain static html content.

I would reccomend that you contact support and explain your trobules to them. It may be that your server is slow right now becuase of the filer issues - even if your data isn't stored on the bum filer. It could also be that someone's using up a lot of resources on your server right now, in which case support may be able to shut them down or move you to a different server.

--Matttail
art.googlies.net - personal website

I came to DH after trying out TextDrive for a Rails site, and I must say DH has been far, far better in terms of performance and stability. My site was going down constantly at TextDrive because of how they run their Rails apps.

If the recent problems that DH has been having get resolved, I'll have no reason to leave. Hopefully they'll fix things and everything will go back to normal.

While there is lots I love about DH, I have to agree that PHP runs s-l-o-w on DH servers.

I came to DH after trying out TextDrive for a Rails site, and I must say DH has been far, far better in terms of performance and stability. My site was going down constantly at TextDrive because of how they run their Rails apps.

How were you running your Rails app at TextDrive, lighttpd/mod_fastcgi or Apache? What kind of problems were you having?

I'm not using any Rails applications right now but I always figured I'd run them at TxD if I need one because lighttpd performs so much better than Apache.

To keep things on-topic, there's a suggestion posted for DH to install lighttpd. Vote for it if you need it!

How were you running your Rails app at TextDrive, lighttpd/mod_fastcgi or Apache? What kind of problems were you having?

They run all the rails stuff on Lighttpd/FastCGI. It was absolutely horrendously unstable.

The site would go down after a mild spike in traffic -- 500 Internal Server Error -- and stay down until either I manually restarted Rails or my Cron job did. I had to have a Cron job running every hour to make sure that my site was still up because it was going down so often.

In addition to that, TextDrive has something that they call "the Samurai" -- a watchdog that kills any process that's consuming too much CPU time. In an ideal world, that would prevent a buggy app from slowing down all the other apps on the shared server, but in this case what it was doing was killing any popular apps at peak time!

There's a long post about it on their forums; I started it when I was still a TextDrive customer. By the end, I had gotten so fed up with the utter instability of Lighttpd that I had become a DreamHost customer.

I'm not using any Rails applications right now but I always figured I'd run them at TxD if I need one because lighttpd performs so much better than Apache. To keep things on-topic, there's a suggestion posted for DH to install lighttpd. Vote for it if you need it!

No!!!!

Sorry... I just had flashbacks of staring at 500 Internal Server Error pages because of Lighttpd... smile

I used to think that Lighttpd was better for Rails sites than Apache. It's true that if everything is running perfectly, Lighttpd is faster than Apache for Rails apps. However, what they don't tell you is that Lighttpd is horrendously unstable. You simply can't depend on it. It will go down on you the second you start getting a moderate amount of traffic (say, around 2,000 page views a day).

The only thing Rails hosting on TextDrive is good for is learning. That's it. If you try to run a real site on it, it will blow up.

Believe me -- the guys at TextDrive are really nice, but their Rails hosting sucks. It's ironic considering that David Hienemeier Hansson and the creators of Ruby on Rails call them the "official" Rails hosting site. I guess they had to make money off of Rails somehow. tongue

You can read my thread on the TextDrive forums here:
http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=10972&p=1

In reply to:
Two months later, my experience isn't exactly what I was expecting.

Unfortunately, I think you chose the wrong time to try DreamHost. The last month or so have by far been the worst I can remember since being with DreamHost, with my sites being slower than usual and sometimes unreachable.

I really do feel for the DreamHost techs at the moment, they seem to be lurching from one major failure to the next. Thankfully, they seem to be on top of things now and hopefully things can return to their normal uneventful status.

Mark

In reply to:
...they seem to be on top of things now and hopefully things can return to their normal uneventful status.

I really hope so as there are many things I like in DH. Unfortunately with such high average server loads, a feature-rich host is practically useless.