By gtoddv on

I am running two sites on a shared plan with Lunarpages. They just moved my sites to a dedicated server due to excessive CPU usage. They have also removed Drupal from their Fantastico list.

These sites are very specialized and don't get much traffic. One site is public and the other is an intranet site using securesite to control access. That site only has maybe 90 members.

Anybody have any ideas about reducing the load on the server?

Is this problem common among users? My public site has been up for over a year now, the Intranet has been up for 4 or 5 months. Both are running 4.6.3. I haven't noticed much chatter about resource usage here in the forums.

Please! Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

gtoddv

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

What did you have your cron jobs set up as? Were they running ever 5 minutes?

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robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Cron doesn't do very much if you run it that often. For example, the search index uses cron to update itself. It only does this, though, if there are new or updated nodes. Otherwise it just returns. Same with aggregator. Now, if you had thousands of feeds and were telling them to update every 5 minutes, that would be a problem. Otherwise, cron is less expensive than accessing the front page, and one hit every 5 minutes shouldn't cripple any server.

- Robert Douglass

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budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
commented

We have a pretty big list of RSS feeds, which kill cron.php -- lukily aggregator2 module then implemented support for staggered rss feed updating to resolve this issue.

If there's custom/3rd party modules which don't play nice with hook_cron() that could still be a place for host abuse.

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gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

One site is every hour and the other is using poormans cron (due to secursite) running every hour.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Nobody could say that Drupal is "lightweight"... it takes a fair number of db queries to build a non-cached page. BUT there is no reason why any professional host couldn't handle it. It isn't THAT intensive. Most likely there is some sort of configuration problem, or they're running versions of Apache, etc. that don't have latest features. I read somewhere about the .htaccess causing a circular reference and old Apaches not being able to detect this. Only one problem like that would convince an inept host that Drupal is no good. But then, if they're running ancient versions of Apache, what can they expect?

Can you provide some configuration details? What Apache, what PHP, what MySQL?

- Robert Douglass

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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

Since they have removed me from the server I can only provide the information for the server I was moved too.

Linux Kernel version 2.4.21-37.ELsmp
php 4.4.1
MySQL 4.0.25 standard
apache 1.3.34

This may not apply to the system I was on.

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

Why would they pull Drupal from their fantastico list? I have a number of different service providers and have never seen one that didn't offer Drupal. They had it on the list as recently as two weeks ago.

A little troubling

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Have you asked them for more details? Tell them the Drupal community wants to play nice. Do they have slow query logs for your sites? Do they have security concerns? They can't really expect people to fix the problems unless they're more specific.

- Robert Douglass

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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

Yea, I have been trying all morning to get some specifics from them, to no avail. Been a customer for two years. Very sad.

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

I think I might finally get some information from them. I finally got someone to respond to me and I wrote back explaining my situation. I also added this to the response...

"...The Drupal community is also concerned that you have done this without enumerating exactly the issues. We have also noticed that you have removed Drupal from your fantastico installation. It would be helpful to myself, my client, and the entire Drupal community, if you could tell me what was causing the excessive CPU usage."

The technical staff is going to review and respond (at least thats what they told me)

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

Any webhost would be foolish to ignore Drupal.

- Robert Douglass

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My sites: HornRoller.com, RobsHouse.net

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

They were pretty gracious in their latest communication but still couldn't provide anything particularly helpful in the way of specific processes. They told me if I could get the sites down to 1% of system resources, they you restore the sites back to their original server, otherwise adios. Here are the stats they sent, mind you these are from the server they moved me to...

[Dec 1st 2005]
scvotes2 scvotes.org 1.97 0.13 0.2
Top Process %CPU 59.0 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 47.0 [php ]
Top Process %CPU 37.0 /usr/bin/php

[Nov 30th 2005]
scvotes2 scvotes.org 2.79 0.12 0.3
Top Process %CPU 90.0 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 65.5 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 53.0 php -q cron.php

Really don't know what to do at this point. My customer has invested quite a bit in these sites.

rkerr’s picture

rkerr commented

How are they running php .. cgi or fastcgi or something? Seems strange that "php" would show up by itself in a process list if they were using the usual Apache module.

killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

I hope it isn't fast-cgi as I rather like this way of running php.
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gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

Since my sites were moved to a temporary server, I can't be sure of the configuration. They say they are running suPHP on most servers. Can't tell what the current server is running.

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

Here are the usage statistics for today:

scvotes2 scvotes.org 1.61 0.09 0.1
Top Process %CPU 54.0 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 26.5 /usr/bin/php
Top Process %CPU 17.0 php /home/scvotes2/public_html/cron.php

The cron job, which I guess is from your moodle installation, isn't the top process.

Something has changed, your PHP usage has gone up. We are unable to tell you which script it is due to the way PHP is implemented on the server. You can disable scripts which you suspect, then e-mail us for a CPU usage update, this can be simple or complex task, depending on how many scripts you have installed on the account.

Drupal is a fairly intensive script to run, so when we added Fantastico, it wasn't added to the list of scripts available for automatic installation.

http://www.lunarforums.com/forum/index.php?topic=16558.0

It is possible that Drupal is using causing the high CPU usage, but it could also be any other script on your account. We don't disallow Drupal, but we just don't offer it through Fantastico. All the servers were checked manually last week to ensure that all the right scripts were being offered, but these checks didn't show up Drupal on your server.

Again, it's not banned, it just has to be manually installed.

You can check this for further information: http://www.lunarforums.com/forum/index.php?topic=17387.0

My advice at this stage is to temporarily disable the script which you suspect is causing the high usage, then to e-mail us to have a resource usage update e-mailed to you.

You can assure the users on the drupal forum that we do support Drupal, we have no problems with people using it, unless it were to cause high usage, which is monitored on a per-account basis. There is certainly no ban on it.

We have moved you to a temporary server so that you can investigate whether it is Drupal, or another script.

I haven't changed anything so I don't understand why all of the sudden the site is causing this much trouble. I also spent a good deal of time last night enabling cache and auto-throttle. I thought the site was running much better but the difference according to the log is barely perceptible.

I did have moodle installed but removed it a couple of days ago.

sami_k’s picture

sami_k commented

Use fewer unnecessary modules like the path module. Run it with stock Drupal as much as possible. Edit robots.txt to reduce the number of robots that crawl your site at a time. Enable the cache. If you wanna be more hardcore about it, with the non-core modules you're using read the code and optimize them to use fewer queries. Post the patches to Drupal.org
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gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

Thanks Sami! Unfortunately I am stuck with the modules I have installed. My customer wants the functionality. I am hoping the answer is much simpler, as nothing had changed on the site to account for the increased CPU cycles.

I also am just as concerned that they have removed Drupal from their hosting offerings.

avskip’s picture

avskip commented

I run a fair amount of modules in 4.6.3 and have had zero complaints thus far with traffic or cpu/system usage.

It sounds to me as if they either don't have the technical know-how to fix or truly advise you of the real issue. They may have inadequate servers for the task or too many accounts on the server.

I've been with Site5 hosting for about 5 or 6 months and it's been a fairly smooth ride once I got used to them.

gtoddv’s picture

gtoddv commented

I am probably going to move these over to Site5. I am already a customer there and have been very pleased with their service. They did shut down a postnuke site I was running but I managed to get them to turn it back on. Other than that, absolutely no problems with them. And you can't beat their prices.

wellsy’s picture

wellsy commented

I would also mention that servage.net are very drupal friendly as well

wellsy

orchidsonline.com.au

mike3k’s picture

mike3k commented

I've been getting a lot of warnings from Dreamhost about excessive CPU usage by MacMegasite, which gets about 20,000 hits a day. The solution I finally came up with was to create a lightweight home page that doesn't use any Drupal code but simply queries the node table and displays 10 articles at a time. I've only been using it for two days and it seems have helped a lot.

The basic code for for displaying the content is something like this:

<?php
$dbname="your_database_name";
$host="your_host_name";
$user="your_user_name";
$pass="your_password";

$dbi = mysql_connect($host,$user,$pass);
mysql_select_db($dbname);

$query = "select nid, title, teaser from node where status=1 and promote=1 order by nid desc limit 10";
$res = mysql_query($query,$dbi);
while (list($nid,$title,$teaser) = mysql_fetch_row($res)) {
     // print the teaser with links to the full article in Drupal ....
}
?>

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killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

Do you run their standard install or did you recompile php and run it as cgi as they recommend if you need extra php extensions?

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mike3k’s picture

mike3k commented

I'm using their standard install running PHP as a CGI (which is one option they provide for each domain).

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killes@www.drop.org’s picture

killes@www.drop.org commented

PHP as CGI is a well known ressource hog. Running that can be expected to put strain on the server as for each page request a new process has to be started. Any site with a noticable amount of traffic will consume a lot of CPU. Try to get them to offer you hosting based on mod_php or mod_fastcgi.
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