Comments on: YirNews: Can Success Kill Yirmumah?

By: DJ

DJ — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:19:57 +0000

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!

By: kashani

kashani — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:24:24 +0000

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

By: Evan Skibin

Evan Skibin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 03:33:02 +0000

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.

By: Evan Skibin

Evan Skibin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 03:15:10 +0000

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?

By: chadvavra

chadvavra — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 02:21:57 +0000

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.

By: DJ

DJ — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:51:16 +0000

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.

By: chadvavra

chadvavra — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:12:04 +0000

CPU usage and bandwidth usage are 2 very different things.

Find out what they want lower before you go cutting out images and stuff.

By: DJ

DJ — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:32:51 +0000

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.

By: Evan Skibin

Evan Skibin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:24:50 +0000

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.

By: chadvavra

chadvavra — Mon, 20 Jun 2005 21:25:40 +0000

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.