VPS Server Load

[andychev]

Is there a problem with the vps accounts? I ask because they always seem to be under heavy load, and seem to all follow each other rather than be independant. At one point today every vps was at a minimum of 5 cpu load with one at 72! is this one vps with very high load causing problems for everyone else?

[Alexander]

Sure, every VPS is independent, but they share the same hardware. As a result, there are some cases when load on one VE can affect the rest, for example disk load. The situation is normal at the moment, but we'll still keep an eye on it.

[omarfilip]

I've noticed the same thing - enough that it takes 10-20 seconds on occasion to load the home page on my site.

[andychev]

There seems to be something wrong as with a good as blank vps it runs anything upto 5 in cpu load. In apache the top process seems to be server based:

9-1-0/0/1270. 22.93 3742400.00.0028.19 127.0.0.1cpvpsxxx-vern.xxxxxx.com OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0
There are two of these with cpu usage of 22.93 (above) and 14.71

In CPU/memory status there is
Top Process%CPU 7.0/usr/bin/php -q /home/service/netstatus/cmd.php

but this is very normal. Other than that taking up the cpu there are no sites being served from the server yet the cpu load is anything between 3 and 6.

[Matt]

Andy, on your side of the world, you are usually just getting up when the nightly backups and cpanel updates start.

As I told Omar the other day, we came across some silly configuration to which every VPS was running cPanel updates at the exact same time. That was causing some I/O issues on the disks which was slowing everyone on that machine down.

Yesterday, about 9PM and 11PM EST we were doing some work to try to correct this and you may have seen load issues again during this time.

Now what we have done is set each VPS to fire off their updates starting at 1am until 5am one VPS goes every 20 minutes...

We are hoping this will solve some of the I/O issues that we are seeing late at night.

Also remember you are coming back into a shared hosting from a nice dedicated server so no matter what platform you are on its going to feel a lot slower.

My understanding of VPS (we will have to ask Sergey later) is that the loads are typically higher because the processor is virtual and is just a segment of a normal CPU its almost always going to be at least in the 2-3 range on VPS even if it is a blank machine, which isn't necessarily an issue. When things get much above 6-10 you will probably feel issues and can even feel issues when the load is low but the I/O is high.

Anyways we have some other issues on that box today and we are going to quarantine one of the VPS on there which is not playing nice with the rest of your VPS's to see if this helps things a bit.

[andychev]

Hey Matt, I understand all of that and it was exactly what i would have said. I do feel however that there may be one bad apple spoiling the bunch (or maybe two) im sure you are aware which these are. When they crash as they do several times a day everyone elses server load seems to go below 2 which is where i would expect it to be, in effect it is a slower processor so loads will be exagerated more. However when these two are running all the other vps's seem to struggle The load issues seem to be all the time (except when two particular vps's crash)

Although i agree it should feel slower than my nice ded box was when it takes 20+ seconds to load a simple html page you begin to question it.

Anyways hope you manage to get to the bottom of it!

[Matt]

Common guys are you really seeing 20 second+ page loads or does it just feel like that? i understand it is slow but are we exaggerating here or are these realistic figures?

[omarfilip]

Unfortunately, it is 20 seconds from time to time, I've measured it. It's been even worse on occasion. Ping and traced route at the slow time look like they always do - 29ms and 16 hops.

[andychev]

At times sure it has 'felt' like that but at times it can seriously take that amount of time. Running wonderfully at the moment

[omarfilip]

The speed seems to fluctuate because of some external factors - one reload of the home page is 3 seconds, the next is 10 and so on. My site is not in production yet, so the only activity is a cron job every 10 minutes that checks pop-3 email.