YirNews: Can Success Kill Yirmumah?
No. But, I Woke up to a weird warning email from my webhost…. details inside:
Warning– semi-nerd talk follows, some of which I don’t even understand to this point:
52 days ago we recieved a mention on Slashdot and got HAMMERED with traffic. I got an e-mail from Dreamhost, our great webhosting provider, who said we were using too much of the servers CPU usage or something. I had never heard of such a thing before. So we were put on a test server or something, special monitoring us. I couldnt figure out how we were in trouble since we weren’t using up our paid bandwidth amount…. I never knew CPU usage could be a problem at all. So our usage went back down, and then… PENNY ARCADE!!!
So we of course got a lot of attention over the weekend, and TONS of traffic (thanks again PA), but i got this e-mail warning us that our usage was up again and it was like a warning that they could disable our account if we didnt figure it out. I immediately thought of Scott Kurtz’s old rant about “Can Success Kill your Webcomic” — And I was briefly frightened and pissed that what a catch 22 that would have been. We finally get some huge traffic, and it completely kills us.. fuck that!! So I did some google searching– and I found….
The problem seems to be with WORDPRESS. see this topic : http://wordpress.org/support/topic/34120
So here I Was panicing thinking it was something we did here using up all the CPU– and here it’s a program that Dreamhost readily promotes it’s use in their own ads. And keep in mind, we’re not using any fancy plugins or anything… just the nuts and bolts themes and simple stuff. And yet, I felt threatened by Dreamhost. — Dreamhost is a GREAT service provider. They’ve been nothing but helpful to us, and I’ll remain using them. And I REALLY don’t want to get rid of the wordpress blog because of this crap. I took the steps in that thread of turning off pingbacks, etc… BUT– damn, I can’ t shake the idea they shouldnt be promoting the usage of Wordpress if it’s going to kill CPU usage on their servers… and then make ME feel threatened that my site is going to go away.
BLAH!!! We’ll ride this one out. We’re all paid up, and have given Dreamhost a lot of business in the past year. They’re a great group of folks… I hope they can figure this thing out without it effecting the end users like US.
Ok– enough technical crap talk– I’m off to paint my garage. ASS KICKING PILGRIM STYLE!
June 20th, 2005 at 3:06 pm
if you need somebody to get all technical on their asses let me know brosef.
I’ll geek them into submission in no time.
or I can help optimize shit too. you know, actually be useful.
June 20th, 2005 at 5:25 pm
I read that thread you linked up and it sounds like its just some jackass system guy sending out the threats, not a company policy.
I would defanitly tell them that it feels threatning to get a message like that though. Maybe you could get a free month too.
June 20th, 2005 at 8:24 pm
What up, long time reader, second time poster here. I was a actually a little bit concerned about your traffic spiking when you switched to the new layout a couple of weeks ago. (Was it days, weeks, months? my sleep cycles are not very regular, i find it hard to keep track) but instead of loading a single comic strip you are now loading up to 4, not to mention the text which takes up no traffic. Surely that fact alone a least triples your traffic. I guess there are good citizens like me and possible a large section of your readership who turn up their cache way too high with the help of splendid browsers like fire fox and the oh so wonderful Opera and therefore don’t waste useful traffic re downloading all of the content on subsequent visits, but i still cant help but feel that all he other users are relentless in wasting your traffic through no fault of their own.
Peace out.
June 20th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
That’s interesting Evan– and I didn’t think about that at all… DAMMIT! I’m still an amatuer at most of this web stuff… It looks so pretty! I hope the usage goes down a bit. This really has been great for feedback and commenting here on the main page.
June 20th, 2005 at 9:12 pm
CPU usage and bandwidth usage are 2 very different things.
Find out what they want lower before you go cutting out images and stuff.
June 20th, 2005 at 9:51 pm
Yeah– It’s CPU usage– Im in no danger of bandwidth usage– it boils down to the damn Wordpress engine eating a ton of CPU usage or something– probably with pingbacks, and comments, the tagboard, etc…. I disable the pingback things– Worse case scenario– I’ll make the main page just bare bones like before, and have the link back to here and I’ll keep the blog page as my blog section so I can rant a bit more about crap. It probably has a TON to do with all the traffic coming in and wordpress’s usage put together…. sigh.
June 20th, 2005 at 10:21 pm
you could see if the host can run a ‘top’ command on your servers stuff, see what processes are taking up the most CPU and then you woundn’t have to fuck with stuff blindly.
June 20th, 2005 at 11:15 pm
I am fully aware of the differences between traffic and CPU load, this is just something that has been nagging at me that i haven’t had the opportunity to bring up until now. As far as the wordpress issue goes i am pretty sure that it is to blame, being based on php it generates the website from the info within the database every single time that a user requests the site. At the bottom of the page it says the site took 1.25 seconds to generate, without the percentage of the CPU that that was used to perform the operation it is virtually irrelevant but none the less seems way too long. Could a possible solution be to generate the homepage somehow in html and have that as the front with only the secondary links being generated real time since those are more frequently edited. This would completely cut out the wordpress workload for all the users who come to the site an only look at the homepage before proceeding to browse for bling on ebay?
June 20th, 2005 at 11:33 pm
My friend who is more clever then i in these matters said:
What seams to be taking the time is processing data from the wordpress database, need to cut down on the number of queries per request.
Hope that helps.
June 21st, 2005 at 11:24 am
I’m a sysadmin and a Wordpress user so I might be able to shed some light on this. When I click on a link in my Wordpress while also using the Unix tool top at the command line I need this.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
8291 apache 15 0 14952 14m 13m S 2.3 2.9 0:08.95 apache
The only interesting parts of that line is CPU which is 2.3%. That’s the amount of CPU it took to server to parse the PHP page, make a db call, generate the html, and display it to the user. When you’re getting a lot of traffic, you’ll see a number of these processes each grabbing some fo the CPU. When Yirmumah grabs most of the CPU Yirmumah and the other sites get slower. The other sites call Dreamhost to complain and that’s what makes Dreamhost unhappy. I know I’ve had those calls myself. So the admin isn’t out to get you as someone mentioned, he just doesn’t want to deal with angry customers. And most shared hosting solutions have an “at the admins discretion” type clause. That’s pretty flexiable in most cases and probably why they haven’t forced you to get your own server.
There are a number of performance hacks you can try, but I’m going to narrow it down to the two I think are going to be worth the most effort and be the simplests to maintain.
eaccelerator is a PHP cache and is the active incarnation of turck-mmache which is pretty much dead. The admin of the server will need to install it and make some changes to your php.ini for mod_php. This will cache php scripts and speed the parse times. I already use it so I can’t say what the speed increase might be. It will however help all sites on the server that use PHP if the admin is willing to install it.
wp-cache is a Wordpress plugin. When someone views your site the index.php generates the page dynamicly. wp-cache takes that dynamic page and makes it into a static file which subsequent users view. I did some tests on my server and this is the CPU usage that viewing the front page takes now.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1577 apache 15 0 12912 12m 11m S 0.3 2.5 0:00.54 apache
Going from 2.0-2.3 to 0.3 is a very nice gain. The default value for wp-cache is 3600 sec or 1 hour. You might want to lower that into the 10-15 minute range so people can see comments and stuff in a reasonable amount of time. There is also a place to set scripts as non-cache-able so you can keep certain parts of the front page dynamic if need be. Unfortunately you or someone is probably going to have to get their hands a little geeky for you to get the behavior you’ll likely want.
Even if you don’t use wp-cache for the site it might not be bad idea to install it and have it ready for those days when PA or ./ links to you. I’ve seen many sites put up “static content mode” messages and flip over to a less dynamic site to get through the day/week until traffic subsides.
Hope that helps and I think your comic kicks enough ass to spend an hour or so looking into this and doing some testing.
kashani
June 21st, 2005 at 12:19 pm
Thanks Kashani! I must admit, half of the stuff you said sounded greek to me, especially before coffee…. BUT I’m gonna look into this plugin at least. The other thing, I’m going to e-mail to Dreamhost tech and see if they want to do it or not.
Thanks so much!