About a week ago I noticed a sudden spike in my Private Hosting memory consumption. And when I say a spike, I mean a spike
Literally within a day I was through the roof and I had absolutely no idea why. I had attributed my previous increase in consumption to a recent traffic increase but a jump like that was ridiculous.
I was fairly certain that this must be a malfunctioning script running somewhere but a quick ps -e didn’t give me any hints. So I turned to Dreamhost support. I fired a quick ticket and got my first reply within 2 days and unfortunately it wasn’t what I wished for.
Basically, the support told me that they cannot know what I am running on my site and thus cannot really help me. I should figure it out myself. Needless to say I was a bit disappointed.
Thanks for the reply Brian but I’m a bit dissapointed. Your reply was basically “we can’t help you. Figure it out yourself” which is a bit of a letdown compared to what I’m used from Dreamhost support.
The thing is, that in the Dreamhost PS information, you mention that 300Mb should be enough for a top 100 blog. I don’t even have a top 100k blog and I do not run any custom code. I run 3 wordpress blogs and 2 galleries and that’s it.
While I can imagine that some plugin is malfunctioning or possibly a site being hacked and running custom code, I’m not an expert on this stuff and without full access it get pretty impossible for me to figure it out.
I can understand that Dreamhost cannot be expected to troubleshoot everyone’s usage, but on the other hand for someone now really knowledgeable this sounds just wrong. From what my point of view, the “usage”, which I cannot verify in any way independently and does not have any visible basis, could just steadily keep increasing to 2000Mb and I couldn’t do anything about it other than just fork out money.
In any case, I’ll see if I can find anything myself
One more day passed and then I had a much better response. Another support person took over and gave me some tips to try as well as some possible command. ps auxe > serverlog
So I gave it a try and, lo and behold, now 4 misbehaving scripts were revealed. One was an instance of my very own complexlife plugin taking up 15% of the ram, while the other 3 where instances of the photodropper plugin, each taking a 10% . Altogether pretty much explained why my usage was so extreme.
So it was time to bring out my good friend –kill– and get me rid of some unruly processes.
Whoop-de-doop, my memory consumption is back to sane levels. This is why it pays to have some good support at your company. I’m happy once more 😀
I knew about Super Cache way back 😀 The problem was me not bothering to install it!
Tsk! I could have told you about ps auxe. Stupid support system. Ewan and I survived a Digg effect all on our own 🙂
Well, I wouldn't call it "survive", more like die and resurrect 😛
And in any case, If I hadn't told you about supercache, you would still be down 😛
Well, all of my plugins give me something I want, otherwise I wouldn't use them 😉
Most of the things you've disabled are just sidebar scripts which I've put there so as not to have the sidebar empty. My problem was not caused by them however since they run on 3rd party servers. My problem was caused by WP plugin which you cannot turn off or avoid as they work through the system.
Well, I hope they do. Would not make any sense otherwise.
Hm, yeah, the crosssite-stuff is off. So was it malfunctioning by itself? I did not get it completely..