Comments for The Official DreamHost Blog!

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:57:00 +0000

Nice charts. I was confused by memory spike a couple of days ago. I actually made some changes and was puzzled by why it affected memory usage so much. Now it is clear that you guys were making updates and displayed total memory as actual for a while. I like the new version much better than old one. But I can see where people might get scared/confused with Total Memory, although in reality they are being charged for Actual Memory only. I think if you can make color changes to make Total Memory look more subtle, or not colored in as Actual memory it should help. And it should be an easy change with Flot that you’re using for this. Great job, glad you’re working on making things better for us!

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by neb

neb — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:07:46 +0000

@Kyle – Thanks for the clarification. From what you describe, we’d likely get optimal performance from our VPS if Total is at or below our max RAM allocation. This makes sense, but is a bit misleading. Linux will generally try to use all available (non-resident) memory for disk cache. The result is that, as you add more RAM, the Cache and Total will generally increase as well, even if files are just hanging around in your roomy cache. Still, at least for Web servers, more cache can yield better performance.

Thanks for making these new metrics available.

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Omkar

Omkar — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:55:54 +0000

Thanks Kyle. I am seeing the updated MySQL PS graphs now.

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:22:36 +0000

@neb If you see that your actual usage is dominating your total memory usage it means that the system can not hold in disk cache to provide efficient access to that recently read files that are likely to be accessed again in the near future. With little to no disk cache available to your system you will see more reads from actual disk and that can reduce the speed at which some operations can be preformed.

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:18:50 +0000

@Omkar I just checked a few accounts with MySQL VPS machines and I see the updated graphs. Try clearing your browser cache and see if that does the trick. If clearing the cache doesn’t take care of the problem please submit a support ticket so we can straighten it out for you!

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by neb

neb — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:17:22 +0000

I’ve asked DreamHost for clarification of their memory monitoring in the past. There was always a discrepancy between these graphs and the values you can get from the shell.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but the new Total now appears to be consistent with the ‘used’ memory reported by running ‘free -m’ in a shell. Free also shows ‘cached’ which is consistent with the new Cache graph. The new Actual graph appears to be Total – Cache (as stated). This value is also shown when running ‘free’ (the second row under ‘used’).

Notice that running ‘top’ will show you RES (resident) memory, which is, confusingly, not quite Actual.

I’m all for more information, but this doesn’t seem relevant, since the OS controls cache (right?). Actual is the only metric we actually need to monitor, in order to set our RAM allocation. Please explain how the new cache/total values are useful or important in setting the RAM allocation.

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Guy

Guy — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:14:38 +0000

I’ve been having the same problem Darren described, for months. Kept increasing memory allocation and paying more and more for it. Still was getting emails about memory limit being exceeded. Eventually I decided not to pay more but started putting my sites with another provider – I went from about 30 sites on DH to just two now – and I’m still getting the ‘memory limit’ messages every other day or so.

Support was no help at all, they expect you to debug what is causing the memory spikes on your own. Actually removing the sites has made almost no difference and the two that remain are tiny, almost no-traffic sites.

To me it seems like there is an incentive for DH to make shared hosting performance really bad so people will then go over to a VPS to see if that helps – when it doesn’t (much) the only thing they can do is increase the memory and pay more and more. It never seems to quite work though…

I am actually getting way better performance with another host on shared hosting than I did with DH’s VPS – so very soon it will be ‘goodbye DH and stick your VPS memory messages where the sun don’t shine’.

Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:12:00 +0000

@Shelly Clear you caches on Firefox. I had the same issue with Chrome, with Firefox working just fine. After I cleared cache it was ok in both browsers. I’m talking with Dev to see if we can make that a non-issue.

@Omkar You pay for what you set in the panel, the graphs are simply there to help you see how your machine is using the memory you are already paying for.

Comment on A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Discusses OpenStack & Ceph by scozyTync

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Comment on Improvements to VPS reporting by Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:02:43 +0000

@Jon should have been phrased “avoid the need to do an expensive disk *read* which would be considerably slower.