Swimming In Molasses

In February, Dreamhost moved my sites to a different server as part of what they called “our efforts to spread load and make your hosting experience more pleasant.”  So far, I have not experienced any of the “more pleasant” part, but I do seem to be experiencing the load spreading bit.

In 2005 I got a nastygram from Dreamhost telling me that I was using too many resources on my shared server account and that if I didn’t fix it I would have to move to a dedicated account.  What I discovered was that referral spammers and other lowlifes were hammering the server.  I took steps to correct the problem and I use some fairly aggressive .htaccess blacklisting to keep it from even hitting PHP and EE.  Those steps helped a lot, and my server usage decreased quite a bit. 

Then, late last year, I undertook a comprehensive review of how I was using Expression Engine and made quite a few changes to streamline things.  I increased the EE template caching interval and disabled unneeded tags.  This had the effect of getting the main page render time down to under 1 second, which was pretty good. 

But ever since my sites were moved to the new server I’ve been seeing horrible page render times:

This page has been viewed 970582 times
Page rendered in 6.5218 seconds
38 queries executed

And that’s a fairly good one!  The problem seems to be someone else on the server, because whenever I log into the system to check, the load averages are very high (it was 60 when the above was generated; one day I saw it at 300) and it’s not being caused by me.  Ever since the nastygram incident I’ve had resource monitoring enabled on my account, and my account usage never goes above about 9% of the CPU and consistently seems to hover around 5% (they used to say that anything under 10% was great).

After dealing with it for so long and hoping that Dreamhost would get onto the people causing the problem like they did to me, I finally opened a rather annoyed problem ticket today.  Let’s hope they do something about this soon. 

I’m not expecting to have the equivalent of a dedicated server, given what we pay for Dreamhost.  But I do expect to be able to actually use the damn service that I’m paying for. 

What especially irks me about this is that my sites were doing just fine on the old server and I did not ask to be moved.  They undertook the move on their own and now I’m paying the price in crappy performance. 

2 Comments

  1. Bitter says:

    How very odd that you would be singled out to be moved.  When I had those terrible problems with outages after switching over that went beyond their big meltdown, I wrote them a nastygram that pointed out for years when our website was on your account (didn’t name you, just said was hosted on someone else’s account) that we had great service and that we were once on my own, they sucked.  I told them I wanted to be moved onto a server that had more established up time and fewer complaints.  They moved me and it’s been pretty smooth sailing ever since.

  2. I’m beginning to suspect that I was one of the few users of that server and that they were looking to decommission it, so they moved me elsewhere.

    I definitely noticed that the old server stopped responding to pings, so they didn’t waste any time getting rid of it.

    Regardless, though, this new server really sucks.