Sharing
Virtual hosting is a great idea. Many sites, sharing a smaller number of servers, making maximum use of resources. Generally it works. But there are times when sharing becomes a problem. When your site needs resources that are also simultaneously needed by the co-hosted sites, the conflict manifests through slowing responses. The backend of one of the sites I manage in my spare time (ha!) has an occasional need for intensive database queries, and I had noticed that sometimes the responses were particularly slow. Closer inspection showed the problem was not down to bad indexing, or bad joins, or any of the usual suspects. Memory and CPU didn’t seem to be a problem, but the CPU resource usage reported by the system was relative to the virtual server, and didn’t reflect the actual level of processing capacity being made available by the host environment. It turned out that the co-hosted sites had changed their backend implementation and were now making use of more server-side processing, and had also added encrypted connections, greatly increasing the processing overhead.
The site has shifted to a less-shared environment, though it’s still not perfect. What I really need is a hosted environment with some minimal level of service guaranteed, regardless of the neighbours. There are clouds that can offer this level of guarantee, for a price, but it may be my next move.
Categorised as: Technology