Yeah, long time no post! What can I say in my defense? Nothing much other than I've been crazy busy... And to add insult to injury, this post is somewhat technical, so if you're interested in the techie geekspeak type stuff (not too much of it), read on...

You may have experienced minor outages of the website here and there. I've experienced them too, and quite frankly I'm not too pleased about them. Every time I see them happen I notice one thing: some other user's PHP scripts keep hogging the CPU on the server. Now since I don't have full control over the server, the best I can do is log CPU usage whenever a spike happens to establish patterns as well as present a viable argument (documented with cold hard evidence), rather than just bitch at the techs for not watching the server load closely.

I whipped up a little bash script, which will run as a scheduled task on the sdsa webserver, and it will record the top 50 CPU hogs (other users on the same server) whenever the server gets too busy. The cron (scheduled task) is set up to run every 5 minutes, but it will only dump a log if the load average is greater than or equal to 5 (i.e. five active processes asking CPU for attention, which is a lot). Hopefully I will be able to see a trend and make a case to the admins of the server. If they jerk me around too much, I'll just switch webhosts... that's my last resort, though, since I rather like this webhost.

P.S. My initial rant on this was posted here.


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