<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Hey GLLUG folks, I am an administrator of the website <a href="http://www.lighting-gallery.net">http://www.lighting-gallery.net</a>/, which runs on Apache with PHP and MySQL.  Over the past year we had some difficulty with our former hosting company.  The last straw was when they moved our site to a new server without prior notification and managed to lose a weeks worth of messages and photos.  They must have either transferred over an old backup or the new server must not have gone live until after it was supposed to.  Anyway, we switched to <a href="http://www.a2hosting.com">A2 Hosting</a> last month.  A few days ago, A2 notified me that our site is using more resources than are allowed under the hosting plan. They said the cause for this appears to be high MySQL usage.  I asked for details and they said they were showing a CPU time of 3483 for our database, but were not able to isolate specific queries.  They also said our site was the #2 user of the CPU on the server, although that doesn't mean much to me considering that I don't know how many users there are nor do I know what types of sites they are hosting.  If most of the other sites are static HTML, then being #2 may be understandable.  On the other hand, if our little site is using a greater share of the CPU than e-commerce sites processing hundreds of transactions each day, then I'd be more inclined to believe that our site is not operating as efficiently as it ought to be.  They recommended executing an OPTIMIZE query on our tables, which I will try.  It is a shared hosting account, so my access is somewhat limited.  However, I also have a copy of the site on my own PC which I can work with, although it does not contain nearly as many posts or photos.  Any suggestions on how I might be able to diagnose the issue or improve performance?  We are using SMF for the forum and Coppermine for the photo gallery.  While the host is unsatisfied with our resource utilization, I have not noticed slow performance except on a couple of rare occasions.  Page load times seem acceptable overall, so from my viewpoint, the server is able to keep pace with our demand.  Do you all think I might simply need to upgrade my plan?  We're under the 50 GB monthly transfer limit (we've used 20 GB in December so far) and we are way under the 50 GB disk space limit (we are using 4.5 GB).  Unfortunately, we are apparently over the CPU usage limit, which is the one resource I cannot monitor (as far as I know). Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks <pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">-- Patrick Collora </pre> </body> </html>