[GLLUG] Help with Web Server Resource Usage

[Patrick Collora]

Hey GLLUG folks,

I am an administrator of the website http://www.lighting-gallery.net/, 
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 A2 
Hosting <http://www.a2hosting.com> 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

-- 
Patrick Collora




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