Topic: grailgod's CPU minute usage for today is 128.14 (Page 1 of 1)

Urg. I hate stuff like this! Why would we be using more than average all of a sudden? I'm poking through our stats and the "most called for" script is actually our "/images/styles.css.php" CSS generation script. I'm considering simply replacing that script with a hard-coded generation of the CSS, as per my cached copy on my MSIE 6..0.2900 browser. I've checked this in Mozilla Firefox and it appears to display OK to me, if slightly different.

<developer note>
Modified file "/layouts/ozoneasylum.php"
Replaced line #34...
<link rel="stylesheet" rel="nofollow" href="<?=CONFIG_URL?>images/styles.css.php" title="Asylum Style" type="text/css" />
With new line...
<link rel="stylesheet" rel="nofollow" href="<?=CONFIG_URL?>images/styles_generatedFromPhp.css" title="Asylum Style" type="text/css" />
</developer note>

I'll wait until my next report tomorrow to see if this makes any noticeable impact. Ideas, have you? Let me know!

Your pal, -doc-

-----------------------------------------------------------
PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE MESSAGE VERY CAREFULLY!

If you have read everything and have any questions, please let us know.

Unfortunately it appears that your site is using more than your fair share of system resources on your shared hosting machine sektor. Our system has flagged your account because it is using a large number of CPU minutes per day on sektor. We need you to trim down your resource consumption considerably. Should you ignore this or subsequent warnings your account may be moved to an evaluation server which could cause downtime.

Specifically grailgod's CPU minute usage for today is 128.14.

(What does this mean? Read this:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=3079)

* To understand exactly which of your scripts is using what
resources, please examine /home/grailgod/logs/resources/ starting
tomorrow morning. This file can also be downloaded via ftp or accessed
via the stats page at http://domain.com/stats/resources .

* Every day at 8AM PDT, a new file named "grailgod.sa.analyzed.0" will
be created in the resources directory, and contains a
breakdown of your usage. Older files are kept as
"grailgod.sa.analyzed.1", "grailgod.sa.analyzed.2" and so on, for 7
days.

* If you only see php.cgi in your report, you can find out how to get
more fine detail at:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=3080

* You may also want to evaluate our dedicated server offerings at
http://www.dreamhost.com/dedicated/, which we recommend for busier
sites, sites which experience extremely high volumes of traffic and
/ or use a lot of resources. Plans start at just $99 a month.

You will continue to receive this warning message until your resource usage goes down.

DreamHost Support Team!

BTW, you'll need a password to access the stats.
...Username: crazy
...Password: lunatic

Your pal, -doc-

the gn had this same problem not long ago and it ended up being mostly bot trouble, google and yahoo were hammering the site plus a few Asian spidered were repeatedly crawling it. The /stats ended up being more telling. You might go into the panel and set the stats to report a finer picture and keep an eye there.

There's a lot of documentation at the GN on the issue as Emps beat the bots back with correspondence, robots.txt and a fat stick.

Well, apperantly most of our traffic identifies itself as MS/IE - and the styles.css.php will not cause a lot of cpu load.

I've enabled debugging to do my own time logging - unfortunatly I can't get at the cpu time right now, only the total script time, but it should give us an idea.

Oh, and that dreamhost log is bloody useless ;-) - nor do I believe that each and every request takes that much cpu time (0.3 seconds. Not when my own 'debug' statement claims the page needed 0.09 seconds total.)

I'll be digging into it.
Stay tuned.

so long,

->Tyberius Prime

Go get'em TP!

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

ok, here's what I can tell so far.

a) The dreamhost cpu time counter does not substract IO time - i.e. Time spend while reading files (most page requests actually) or waiting for the database. These things obviously take time, but don't (shouldn't) tax resources.

b) About 30-50% of our php time are being spend just loading the grailapi.
It loads the config files, reads in the settings builds a database connection and defines about a 100 different functions used throughout the system.
This regularly takes 0.1s but goes up to 0.3s on occacions.
(See http://www.ozoneasylum.com/log.txt for the log file).
The db connection seems to be a minor issue here - we're using persistent connections and establishing it only on the first query (which never happens in cached pages) does not significantly improve the request times (0.02 seconds, maybe).


Further investigation is needed - alas I need to run now.
I'll have another look tonight, when I've assembled some more logs.

so long,
->Tyberius Prime

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 11-17-2005 09:32)

ok... I should have shaved off about 30-50% of the time these baby needs simply by not having a big (80k of php code), cached array of (rarly used) user to cell mapping anymore.
I'm now looking up the cell to user mapping on the fly - more db queries, but then again it is seldomly needed (most notably for the /user/userid kind of links which previously were just /cellid .. but hey, can't have everything.)

Let's see how it develops - my logs are seeing the improvement already.

(Edited by Tyberius Prime on 11-17-2005 19:33)

Good work, TP!!

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles

yeah!. Yesterday, we only used 38 cpu minutes ;-)