Poor Dreamhost performance

  • I received the infamous “too many server resources” email from Dreamhost recently. I decided to get active and profile my installation using the PEAR Benchmark class. What I found was surprising to me.

    I’m using WP-Cache 2.0.17 and a fair quantity of plugins. Serving dynamic pages takes more than a second. Serving cached pages takes on average 0.5 to 0.7 seconds. With the Dreamhost restriction for shared hosts of 30 processor minutes a day, that means that after serving roughyl 3,000 cached pages, I’m past my allocation. That’s not counting any uncached pages of which there are sure to be plenty.

    Upon benchmarking the caching, the entire time — well, 90-95% of it — is spent in readfile(). So that single PHP call is taking over half a second to read a simple HTML file and poop it out over the network.

    Does this seem just utterly out of line? This basically means that anything over even a small readership — like when I got linked by Gizmodo which was when I got my warning email — causes me to go over my allocation.

    I’ve got a support email in to them but frankly hold no hope. Just looking for confirmation that I’m not going totally crazy thinking that caching should be a whole lot better performing than that.

Viewing 15 replies - 16 through 30 (of 46 total)

  • I’ve even sent them the link to this thread. They aren’t being very helpful or cooperative. I can’t really do anything without their help. Looking for which file (or files) are causing the problems, is looking for a needle in a haystack at this point.

    Let me know if you need a real host . . .

    As a lot of us host on DH, and they’re a recommended host, if they’re not providing adequate response/investigation then Matt needs to get involved… or nominate someone else with ‘authority’. Note that DH >has< been very receptive in the past, and has also donated money back to WP, so it’s certainly in their history (and in their interest!) to support WP users. ??

    I sent Matt an email a few days ago, but last I remember, he’s over in Europe.

    ColdForged,
    Which version of WP are you using? I’m using the 2.0 code.

    btw, something struck me on the caching optimizations… while it helps to not have PHP processing as much dynamically, it’s causing a much higher disk-hit locally versus DB lookup time (and DB time isn’t local CPU time…). So possible that on crowded apache boxes, you in some cases might be better off with running live PHP, or if we had a caching system that stored into SQL instead of local. Yeah, that sounds SERIOUSLY nutty to me as I write it… hmmm…

    I’ll turn of WP-Cache and see what happens for a day or two.

    Turning of WP-Cache sent my CPU time up to over 120 minutes/day!

    Wow, this thread is really hitting home for me.

    I am relatively new to blogging (is that the right verb?). I started this little experiment off over at simplehost.com.

    I host one blog, several forums and a few sites there as of about june of this year. Only really started getting things rolling in the last month or so and have discovered that their support just sucks. Their SQL server keeps going down and the end result is that my sites have been down more than up over the last two weeks.

    I know price is an issue for many, but if someone wants guaranteed uptime for their sites and the ability to install wordpress, php nuke, post nuke, SMF, etc., etc., etc., who should I be looking at as a host?

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    I know price is an issue for many, but if someone wants guaranteed uptime for their sites and the ability to install wordpress, php nuke, post nuke, SMF, etc., etc., etc., who should I be looking at as a host?

    I strongly recommend A Small Orange. Unlike the other three providers that I have tried, including Dreamhost, A Small Orange has never let me down.

    Disclaimer: No hosting provider can offer 100% uptime. That is the nature of hosting. Unexpected things do happen, especially when you share a server with other users under a “shared hosting” plan.

    Thanks macmanx I will take a look at them.

    I don’t expect 100%. I worked in IS long enough to get that stuff breaks. But when I send a support ticket set to “URGENT” with the title “All sites DOWN!”, I would like to get a response in something less than 4 days. And in addition, to have some effort put into solving the problem. Its been over a week and a half and my sites are still messed up at simplehost.com.

    If the folks at small orange have shown you the kind of support and diligence to solve problems I am looking for, then thats what I need.

    Thanks again.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    But when I send a support ticket set to “URGENT” with the title “All sites DOWN!”, I would like to get a response in something less than 4 days.

    Ah, you’ll be happy with A Small Orange then. All of my tickets have been answered in under thirty minutes (even the “low priority” ones), unless I submit the ticket outside of normal business hours.

    I think I’ll be looking for a new host. DH isn’t providing any help in the matter and I’m also tired of getting their “XYZ service is currently down” emails every other day. I had heard some good things about DH, but I’ve been very disappointed.

    Maybe I’ll look into those VPS plans from A Small Orange. I need more bandwidth than most shared hosting plans provide…that’s why DH’s shared hosting seemed like such a good fit. :-/

    Cool macmanx.

    I am going to start my stuff up at A Small Orange today. Now all I need is for simplehost to get my stuff up long enough for me to back it all up and get the hell out of there!

    Thanks

    Looks like WP is teaming up with Yahoo now. The plans look pretty good and I can’t imagine them ever having much downtime.

Viewing 15 replies - 16 through 30 (of 46 total)
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