CPU throttling

[nobull1]

I just became aware today that Blue host now has throttling on sites that use excessive resources. During the last few months i haven't had to do any amount of c-panel work and just didn't take notice of the icon to click on. So I thought I would try a couple of experiments to see what would cause excessive CPU usage. First i went into my c-panel and opened the CPU throttling page and saw that I was being throttled for about 8 seconds in the last hour. I then went and added a couple of ip addresses to my blocked list and went back and refreshed and found I was throttled for another 6 seconds or so. Then I went and looked at my logs to see who had been accessing my site, and found none recently. The next thing I do is go back and reload my CPU throttling page and now I am up over 20 seconds throttled. It would appear that just using your c-panel will cause Blue host to throttle your account. Now that just doesn't seem right to me, by using the control panel given to use by Blue Host will slow loading of my site.

I read Matt's blog and what I got from it is that throttling is a way to improve server efficiency for Blue host and the customer. The problem is once you have a rein on everyones site then you can add more accounts to the server and not have to worry about the CPU being overloaded for all customers at once. But just as soon as someone steps over the line, that Blue host makes, they cut their access. Now this is a win win for Blue host as they now can add additional income (sites) to a server, and customers that are no longer happy with the lower amount of CPU usage they are getting can now upgrade to a vps/extra CPU usage for additional cost. All of this is fair in the end just so long as you don't drop the CPU usage down so low so a lot of people think they have to upgrade. In my case I have a small site that sees less than 1000 visits, less than 12,000 files and 1 gig of bandwidth a month. The way it is going now I suspect I will have to upgrade to more CPU resources or have customers unable to easily get to my site and have potential income loss. If this is the newest way to control customers I wonder how long it will be before the Hosts provide a reference number to customers as to how much resources are available to individual sites. Hopefully this is sooner rather than later. As of now you don't know if one Hosts throttling is more restrictive than another until you try them. And then they can change the amount allowed anytime it suits their purpose. At one time bandwidth was king, now it appears allowable CPU is the bottleneck.

So the questions are: is this the way of the future? and has anyone else done a similar check and found similar results.

[Doberman]

throttling is a way to improve server efficiency for Blue host and the customer

100% right! I like cpu throttling because it eliminates the process accumulation, last weeks I had really problem with this.

I keep on BH 150 websites with thousands pages each, all websites generate over million pageviews (most by by bots)a month, over 100 GB bandwitdch and I must to say that after cpu throttling back websites work better.

I just hope that throttled will be only sites which generate the biggest cpu consumption.

[Justin]

CPU throttling is my major headache right now. I haven't really investigated what causes the issue. However, one of my sites hosted by Bluehost gets a good amount of traffic all over the world.

I'm left with two choices - either to upgrade or to find a dedicated host. But I can't do the latter because of lack of funds to do that. So, I will stick with Bluehost for the time being.

[ack]

I think CPU throttling will be a strong feature in the future. Load times and quickness of websites is crucial these days and will be in the near future. I find that my sites are being throttled as well. The host that figures this out will have a huge advantage over the other shared hosting providers.

[nobull1]

I think throttling is the way of the future and is here to stay. I still have a problem with throttling the control panel. The control panel is something that is necessary to update your site, follow stats etc. One of the biggest resource hogs on the control panel is the throttle use page:rolleyes:. It will just be a matter of time till the competition gets on board and things will settle down a bit.

[REXTEX]

Well this also has to do with gzip compression, which I have been complaining about for over months. Page Load time has become a real big problem, at least with Google.

Google makes performance part of pagerank
They've been threatening for a few months and just pulled the trigger:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html

[liangzai]

I have 10,000 visits, 100,000 hits, and 1 gig bandwidth. But that's per day. Yet I don't throttle, except for occasional spikes when there is a lot of interaction going on, then I get at most a few hundred secs of throttling per day.

The reason is that I have cached everything that can be cached, using WP Super Cache and Plugin Cache for Wordpress (I have a very heavy theme and many plugins), and also installed eAccelerator. I also got rid of most bots by rewrite rules, and I have lowered Google's crawl rate to a minimum (Google is really excessive, going through an antire blog everyday, despite that there is no change for older posts).

I also made a cache routine for Gallery 3 with some 5000 images.

So to make your site compatible with the low amount of CPU power available you need to take some precautions and cache your stuff to minimize PHP usage and maximize pure HTML output. Unless you have a "blog" of the sort Matt has, with text only, or unless you only have static content.

Before I cached stuff properly, I throttled up to 6000 secs per day.

But even if you do your homework and cache your stuff, you will end up having extremely long load times every night (= day in Europe, where I reside), when Bluehost does its maintenance routines (backup, stats and so on), upping the load balance to 30-40 or so (it should never exceed 8 on average). Then PHP simply doesn't work, and 500 Internal Servers begin to pop up a lot.

Simply put, Bluehost crams too many customers into every box. I wish they had a tiered scheme where one can pay for double resources (CPU, file count). It would make customes happier, and Bluehost wouldn't lose a penny (but gain reputation).


In my case I have a small site that sees less than 1000 visits, less than 12,000 files and 1 gig of bandwidth a month. The way it is going now I suspect I will have to upgrade to more CPU resources or have customers unable to easily get to my site and have potential income loss.

[nobull1]

[QUOTE=liangzai;82745
Simply put, Bluehost crams too many customers into every box. I wish they had a tiered scheme where one can pay for double resources (CPU, file count). It would make customes happier, and Bluehost wouldn't lose a penny (but gain reputation).[/QUOTE]

I think this will be the progression of throttling. It will take awhile to get sorted out, but I think buying extra resources ( for minimal extra cost) will be here soon. There is a middle class of people out there that need just a bit more, and will pay more, than the discount catch all fee. The question will be what is the benchmark? You just gotta love competition:)

[mig39]

I have 10,000 visits, 100,000 hits, and 1 gig bandwidth. But The reason is that I have cached everything that can be cached, using WP Super Cache and Plugin Cache for Wordpress (I have a very heavy theme and many plugins), and also installed eAccelerator.

Hey, how did you install eAccelerator on bluehost? ssh access?

[trustfm]

Where exactly can we find the CPU Throttling Logs into cpanel ?

[Bob Barr]

Where exactly can we find the CPU Throttling Logs into cpanel ?
It's in the "Logs" section along with the error logs and AWstats. By default, you get a snapshot of the previous 24 hours of your account's activity. (I don't know that there's a log stored for previous days. If there is, I've never seen it.)

[trustfm]

By default, you get a snapshot of the previous 24 hours of your account's activity....


I know that.



(I don't know that there's a log stored for previous days. If there is, I've never seen it.)


Thats is what i am asking ...
I see from the previous 24 hours a 80 sec cpu throttling.
The graph is something like this
______I_____I_____I_____I______ with 10/20 seconds peaks
I would like to know if this problem is serious (i have a webpage with 3000 unique visitors daily but the site is static with only php include files) . I do not use queries in order to generate my content.
What do you think ?

Thanks for your time.