Right now, FRL trackbacks are off, and I’m not enabling comments for new posts; I may even have to turn off all comments for a while. I love you all, but here’s the story.
Last night my ISP, Dreamhost, suddenly moved me to an “evaluation host” with a note that my account was overwhelming their server and using up 9% of its resources and that they might shut me down. (To make this even worse, this “evaluation server” is slower than the host my blogs are usually on.) From looking at the numbers, I can understand their concern, but from my end, I don’t have an explanation.
I’ve included the diagnostic post they sent me today. I routinely get comment spam (caught by MT-Blacklist so you never see it) and trackback spam (not caught by anything so I have to dejunk it after the fact). However, not more than usual–in fact much less than before I upgraded to MT 3. I now get about 100 junk posts/trackbacks a night (about 99 are junk). In fact there have been times when it has been MUCH more.
I don’t get why some processes are listed twice; I only have one Movable Type installation. I have already renamed mt-tb.cgi (which controls trackbacks) and may rename the comments file… though again, I only have one.
Note that as blogs go this is not up there with really well-trafficked librarian blogs such as The Shifted Librarian, let alone big public blogs. Something is screwy.
Website traffic, in hits:
Jan 2005 97692 44155
Feb 2005 129930 55500
Mar 2005 177849 75963
Apr 2005 179366 79220
May 2005 178628 81239
Jun 2005 105757 47449
Hits for this month seem to be on track, no telling spikes:
Jun/ 5/05 5209 2394
Jun/ 6/05 7153 3050
Jun/ 7/05 6811 2892
Jun/ 8/05 6608 3065
Jun/ 9/05 6622 2838
Jun/10/05 6829 2908
Jun/11/05 5276 2228
Jun/12/05 6474 3436
Jun/13/05 7035 2859
Jun/14/05 6890 2737
Jun/15/05 6292 2487
Jun/16/05 7066 2963
Then there’s the Dreamhost Process Report, for yesterday:
Process CPU seconds user machine count average
mt-comments.cgi 364.6300 57.926% 1.519% 309 1.180
mt-tb.cgi 152.5300 24.231% 0.636% 90 1.695
php.cgi 72.7200 11.552% 0.303% 703 0.103
run-periodic-ta 30.0500 4.774% 0.125% 37 0.812
mt-tb.cgi 4.6200 0.734% 0.019% 33 0.140
mt-search.cgi 2.5300 0.402% 0.011% 2 1.265
mt-comments.cgi 2.4000 0.381% 0.010% 39 0.062
sh 0.0000 0.000% 0.000% 37 0.000
sendmail 0.0000 0.000% 0.000% 6 0.000
postdrop 0.0000 0.000% 0.000% 6 0.000
———————————————————————-
Total: 629.4800 100.000% 2.623% 1262
Average per day: 629.4800 1 days
CPU percentage assumes 24000 cpu seconds per day total.
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If you use Dreamhost or Movable Type and you have observations that could help, I’m grateful. Meanwhile, I wrote Dreamhost and Six Apart, and I’ll see what happens next.
Posted on this day, other years:
