cpu limits

[crypticfortune]

does anyone else have problems with hitting cpu limits?
I'm on box36, my site runs virtually nothing but gallery2 (CVS version from like feb 3rd or so), and I frequently get CPU limit exceeded errors when uploading photos. This is very annoying as i have no choice but to just try again. As the site admin, I realize I'm on a shared box and these things happen, but for my average user, I'm afraid they would be very confused and give up.

I've already set up gallery to run its tasks at lower priority (nice +) so in theory it should never be taking an unfair share of the CPU.

From checking top, proftpd seems to constantly be eating up a whole cpu. I don't know what bluehost is doing to their proftpd, but that certainly can't be helping their problem! Seriously, over the last 22 days this thing has used 16.9 cpu days of compute time (ie: 76% of the cpu).

Does anyone else have problems with this? I mean, why are niced processes getting kicked? And why should a couple of FTP users be able to monopolize the CPU?

[Peterpp]

I get those very annoying messages EVERY SINGLE DAY and I don't like it!

[walker]

does anyone else have problems with hitting cpu limits?
I'm on box36, my site runs virtually nothing but gallery2 (CVS version from like feb 3rd or so), and I frequently get CPU limit exceeded errors when uploading photos.

I've noticed an awful lot of people complaining about the CPU usage of G2, even on the G2 forums. Could excessive CPU usage be a G2 problem, or perhaps something to do with its modules? One or two of those graphics toolkits certainly hog a lot of resources when performing specific operations.

[Dave]

I get it everytime I try uploading files to my gallery. I have to use a workaround.

But this problem has been addressed before by support. Unfortuanately the posts are gone. What's suprising is they haven't managed to address it again.

Here are other posts about the same problem.

http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=118&highlight=Quota
http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=63&highlight=Quota
http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=21&highlight=Quota

Dave

[alligosh]

Could excessive CPU usage be a G2 problem?

One Word. YES.

Gallery is notorious for sucking up all the cpu resources it can get, and then some. It has to do with the auto-generation of thumbnails from the photos that are uploaded.

The real issue is that by default it auto-generates all the thumbnails while it is uploading them. This means that while the software normally behaves, it slams the server during the upload (shared hosting or not).

Workaround: change the settings to auto-generate the thumbnails when they are first viewed. This will spread out the cpu intensive stuff and not pummel the server, nor get you cpu exceeded restrictions. If you really want your audience to not have to wait on the very first viewing of any given photo, then after uploading you can go look at them yourself. This has the added bonus of allowing you to see how it looks and correct mistakes.

Or you can slam the server and wait for the restriction to pass. Personally, I would prefer the former option.

As for responding faster, most of us do this on our "spare" time, after the kids, pets, and good TV go to bed for the evening. Which means that these are mostly user forums with less input from official staff. If you need official staff to respond, send us a support request. We are happy to answer them.

[2notch]

Coppermine can be a hog too if there are a lot of users. In admin mode, "batch add" creates the thumbnails and intermediate images *after* FTP has finished.

Users can be throttled on how many images can be uploaded at once. This helps spread things out a bit.;)

[Spanners]

Gah! Yeah I run a chatroom and get this all the time, it's really putting people off. I've had to start hacking the code apart and removing functionality just to try and lighten the load.
I never had this issue with other hosts I've used, do Bluehost just have crappy servers or what? :mad:

[alligosh]

Gah! Yeah I run a chatroom and get this all the time, it's really putting people off. I've had to start hacking the code apart and removing functionality just to try and lighten the load.
I never had this issue with other hosts I've used, do Bluehost just have crappy servers or what? :mad:

Actually, the servers are fairly quick; dual CPUs on the first half of them and quad CPUs on the latter half. I have been admining servers like these for over ten years, and I can tell you the hardware can generally handle what is on them (barring spammers and truly poor code, both of which get my personal attention).

As for CPU quotas, we have recently raised them quite a bit in order to attempt to tune them better. Matt feels very strongly about giving the best experience to the customers as we possibly can. I want to make the servers run as well as possible. We have frequent discussions about how to get the best of both worlds, which usually are the same goals, but not always.

Please keep in mind that the "limits" are fairly high. On some of the older machines, it is the equivalent of using over half of the entire CPU cycles available on the server. If a site is using an entire Opteron processor by itself, then either shared hosting isn't sufficient, or the site needs to be optimized.

We are still tuning the limits, and attempting to make sure that one account cannot make all the other users on the box have a bad experience. Bear with us. Customer happiness is very important to us.

[raymart]

I have this problem too. I complained about it to no avail. What irks me is that my previous host managed to handle things just fine (Bluehost is better in every other way). If you use Imagemagik with coppermine, it is very efficient. G2 is much more cpu intensive, but Imagemagik is good. Bluehost should be able to handle it.

[uzforum]

Just want to complain myself - I am running SMF 1.1 with couple of mods on box 159, and it gives me cpu error almost every two-three hours!!!

I never had similar problem with previous hoster, which I moved from because of no shell access. I am running pretty popular scripts (SMF, Coppermine) with moderate number of users. Is Bluehost getting overloaded?

[probedb]

We are still tuning the limits, and attempting to make sure that one account cannot make all the other users on the box have a bad experience. Bear with us. Customer happiness is very important to us.

If you can tune them so they can actually cope with 21 users of phpBB online at the same time that'd be a start ;)

It appears to be the database queries that are doing it so something isn't setup correctly there?