More Dreamhost horrors

[giza]

Honestly, I can't make this stuff up:

[baachus]$ uptime
06:33:00 up 19 days, 17:53, 1 user, load average: 647.50, 809.42, 596.89

Yes, that is a load average in the hundreds.

Comments

[amurussuri.livejournal.com]

I've seen a peak of over 3000 on a 4cpu machine. It actually still responded pretty good :)

[balinares.livejournal.com]

What's the CPU load though?

[giza.livejournal.com]

I'd tell you... if the shell was responsive.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Ah, so I'll assume the answer is 'lots'. :)

See, the thing is, load average is often a poor metric for server load, because what it gives you (on Linux anyway) is the number of processes in the scheduler queue -- meaning it does go up when the CPU is overloaded, sure, but also when lots of processes are waiting for something such as I/O. I've sometimes seen servers with temporary loads in the hundreds (due to NFS) that were still fairly responsive.

Doesn't seem to be the cause of your load, here, though. *g*

[giza.livejournal.com]

I know it's not the best metric.

But, it's historical for the last 15 minutes. Unlike say, iostat or vmstat. I can send Dreamhost the load average and basically say, "it's been this way for the last 15 minutes, and BTW, our website isn't loading either".

[balinares.livejournal.com]

What kind of service do you rent off Dreamhost BTW? Shared hosting, private server hosting, virtual server hosting?

[giza.livejournal.com]

Shared hosting.

The $80/month plan. You think they'd have better service than that.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Holy CRAP.
You should at least be getting a badass virtual server for that kind of dough! >O.o<

[giza.livejournal.com]

Know of anyone who can provide me with the following for that amount of money?:

- A few dozen Gigs/mo of bandwidth
- A few hundreds Megs of diskspace
- Dedicated SSL (i.e., https://www.mydomain.com/)
- PHP 5
- MySQL database with heavy usage due to Drupal. Something with better than 40 milliseconds per query, too.
- A half-decent backend system for managing things.

Find me a host that meets those criteria and I'll switch in a heartbeat.

[toumal.livejournal.com]

80 per month, huh?

how about www.ipx-server.de? That's a dedicated box.

I'm currently at www.theplanet.com, they offer good machines (albeit a tad more pricey)

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Well, the toughie is obviously MySQL, which does not even consistently remain under 40ms/query even on a beastly dedicated 2950. *g* Otherwise, you might really want to consider renting a virtual server. I rent a tiny one for 8.35€/month and it already largely covers your other prerequisites: >900GB/month, 2GB of disk space (in addition to the OS), and full root access (so PHP5 and SSL are about as hard as 'aptitude install').

To be honest, I'm not really sure about hosting a SQL server under a virtual server (because of I/O contention, which would admittedly not be that much of an issue if your host's Dom0 is backed by a suitably sized SAN), but if you're willing to send me an example SQL dump of similar size to yours, I'm willing to give it a whirl on my virtual server to see how responsive (or not) MySQL is with it.

[giza.livejournal.com]

I tried virtual servers before, and didn't have much luck. Specifically, the machine I was on had the unfortunate tendency to have some other VM to tie up the disk, causing my VM to become damn near unresponsive. No, really, here's what I saw in Munin:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/595507166/)

It was a dual core machine, so one of the CPUs was basically sitting on I/O while the other was sitting idle, unable to do anything. This was from Unixshell (http://www.unixshell.com/), BTW. I was not amused with them.

I cannot provide you with a copy of the database dump for the usual privacy reasons, but I can tell you that it is a Drupal installation, and that the total size of the dump file is about 55 Megs.

[balinares.livejournal.com]

Yup, I/O contention, that's my main worry. I don't know to what extent your host backing the Dom0 with a SAN helps, though. (Presumably lots, but I never benched it.)

As for the SQL dump, I was more thinking along the lines of, something with each field in place but replaced with random data, for privacy reasons. I'm not very keen on installing PHP, Drupal and the whole artillery just to run a few queries against the SQL server. :)

But if for $80 you can have a whole dedicated server, like Toumal says, then holy burning crap on a stick, give it a go! Having your own server (virtual or not) makes a huge difference in comfort of administration.

[jlick.livejournal.com]

I use vpslink.com as my primary server currently and have been very happy with their performance, service and uptime. I use their Link-4 plan which for less than US$40/mo will probably be big enough for your needs, if not Link-5 should be plenty.

vpslink is designed for those who know their way around Linux administration. If you need/want a fancy control panel for ease of administration then go to spry.com. Same company/servers but Spry is designed for ease of use and more hand holding. It's a bit more $$$ though.

If you need some advice on tuning mysql to be more efficient on a VPS, let me know. I've got a really tight config that works on vpslink's debian etch box.

[jlick.livejournal.com]

Oh, hey, I just noticed that vpslink will do cpanel for an extra $6-10 a month now.

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

I've seen our web server go up that high. What happens is an NFS server with some files needed by a cgi script goes down, and hundreds of instances of that script launch due to people hitting the page. However, since the scripts are doing nothing but sitting in disk wait, the server remains responsive (for other things) even though the average is in the thousands.

UNIX is fun. :)

[fordarkness.livejournal.com]

i'm not gonna say much other than "jayne and i already gave our opinion of dreamhost". :D

[nius.livejournal.com]

So.. what happened to hosting at NearlyFreeSpeech.net ?

[giza.livejournal.com]

They don't do SSL. :-(

[nius.livejournal.com]

DOH!

[bigtig.livejournal.com]

Wohoo!

Now a drink for every 10 loads over CPU....

Oh dear.

[taral.livejournal.com]

orbital-% uptime                                                 
 11:56:33 up 43 days, 12:52,  7 users,  load average: 1.91, 2.57, 2.86

Something is wrong with your box.

[taral.livejournal.com]

Well, dreamhost's box. That's orbital@dreamhost, and I've never seen crazy load average. If that's still the case, for the love of money, file a bloody ticket.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Oh, I did.

And this isn't the first time this crap has happened. I've filed at least 3 separate tickets over the last month.

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

Even though my site hasn't had the sort of lag you're describing, I'm starting to become dissatisfied with its speed. I think we'll move off DreamHost after we've launched and are running well.