I’m having a little bit of a problem finding the sneaky php script that is making me clock some serious
CPU minutes (yeah like I know what those are, or give two shits about them). Dreamhost have been pretty good not bugging me about this too often, so you might experience a bit of weirdness on the kode, for one I’ll be switching to a normal theme (as my current one needs something like 30 plugins to work and I’m deactivating everything and putting a clean install onto here). So bear with me while I sort my house out.
Ok, let’s hope things are ok now. I need to wait for my next log report to be sure but hopefully sorting out Mint should have done the trick
I’m on Dreamhost too, the CPU minutes are one of those hidden things they don’t really talk about. Had a few warnings, and one shutdown. One thing to take a look at is where you Mint database is at, when it gets maxed out I imagine it has to do more work cleaning house. You can delete a bunch of records, or outclicks and it’ll probably put less strain on having to cull old stuff.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
For some reason I had a feeling it might have been Mint, I was actually still running on v1.14, so I’ve upgraded now. How do I cull a few things then (ie records and outclicks) and not delete whole tables?
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
I trashed outclicks while the site was getting hammered. If you go into the phpmyadmin panel, you can sort by date and delete the oldest stuff. Guess you could probably try setting the db size preference as low as you want to get it and then set it back up higher afterwards (the size pref was introduced in 1.2 I think). Some sort of Mint cleaner might be in order for those times when you get traffic spikes.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
It’s, I’ll take outclicks off straight away, damn it was Mint all along? Hmm that’s rubbish :). If I didn’t like the app I’d be trashing it about now :). Thing is this has happened before and I didn’t have a reason for it back then, it went away and then a few days ago I got another email from DH. Thanks for the help Dave, much appreciated.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
You’re welcome. I’ll agree with you that it is and it isn’t Mint. It’s whatever php process is getting hammered, there isn’t an easy way to figure it out. That said, I think there is something about the Mint and the database getting full. You just have to do some active policing if you want to use non-standard plugins (I see why some things aren’t included) and have a high traffic site. You can kind of see why the default config is the way it is. Outclicks is nice to have, might be better as a seperate application though.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
I saw your fresh K2 install yesterday, and noticed this post. I was going to write back that it’s probably your stats app (it usually is), but i simply had to go to bed by then. Glad things are fixed!
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
Mint was at fault?! It hardly makes a dent on my CPU usage. Were you able to find any details as to how Mint was negatively affecting your CPU load?
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
Wasn’t actually Mint itself, but rather a pepper, at least that what we think, if my CPU minutes have gone down in the next day, then we know what the deal is. Otherwise I’ve got to start looking at other scripts.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
Khaleed another issue, you could temporarily try to deactivate, is the plugin “Recent Activity”, It’s using pretty heavy sql statements, without using any cache it creates a temporary table (bad), and using filesort index searching (BAAAAAAAAAD)…
The larger the database the more performance decrease you will experience…
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
Sorry for double posting… I dont know how your host is configured, but you could ask them to log slow sql statements (that doesnt return in a period of time you or they define), and send the logdump to you…
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
I’m sceptical about Mint Outclicks Pepper being at fault. I can’t understand how it can contribute to the issue mentioned.
Like Dan, I’m much more inclined to suspect the Recent Activity plugin due to the type of SQL queries that it runs.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
Hmm, well the proof will definitely be in the pudding. I’ll check my logs later on tonight and if it hasn’t calmed that down I’ll remove recent activity (even though it’s one of my fav plugins for sure :(
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
@Phu: This is how bad rumours get started, Mint is awesome and so is the Outclicks pepper. Deleting Outclicks is a fast/easy way to trim down your database size if you don’t mind losing the records. The Mint garbage collection can eat up proc usage if your site is getting hammered.
↓ Quote | 10/3/2006
Well updating Mint, disabled outclicks and that’s knocked me down to 15,000 seconds. I’ve also disabled recent comments, so hopefully that will knock a few more 1000 minutes, cross fingers :).
↓ Quote | 11/3/2006
Khaleed, regarding the “Recent activity” plugin, it could be implemented other ways which is less database heavy… Or simply their could be implemented a cache (updated on each new comment) on top of it…
A list of your used plugins could help further to see if other sinners could be found… (Dont forget that wordpress itself is a bit heavy)
↓ Quote | 12/3/2006
It’s been going down, I’ll actually sort out a quick page to show the plugins. It’s still clockin at 13,000 seconds which is a bit much (220 odd minutes), so there is definitely something going on here, not sure what it actually is to be honest. I’ll post a few of the log files as well.
↓ Quote | 12/3/2006