{"id":1469,"date":"2011-02-14T03:32:10","date_gmt":"2011-02-13T17:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=1469"},"modified":"2011-02-14T14:01:18","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T04:01:18","slug":"1469","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2011\/02\/14\/1469\/","title":{"rendered":"Server Hosting Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"aside\">It&#8217;s the middle of the night, my remote server is emailing me in distress, and I am dealing with help-desk staff. I&#8217;m allowed a whinge.<\/div>\n<p>Dear Server Hosting Helpdesk staff,<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had this exact problem many times before. One of your other customers has software that has gone wild and is consuming all of our shared CPU.<\/p>\n<p> (I used to believe you when you said you monitored for this, but I learnt that you did nothing when you discovered it, so now I monitor for it myself.)<\/p>\n<p>No, it isn&#8217;t me.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I <em>know<\/em> I have a single process consuming 20-30% of <em>my<\/em> allocated physical RAM. That&#8217;s why I am paying you for your server &#8211; to run that process for me. It&#8217;s okay, though. I am not running out of RAM. Please locate the problem user&#8217;s processes and kill them, like your colleagues have always done in the past.<\/p>\n<p>No, it isn&#8217;t me.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I <em>know<\/em> I have a fair number of processes, but they are all sitting idle. They may be using RAM, but I am not running out of RAM. Please locate the problem user.<\/p>\n<p>No, it isn&#8217;t me.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I <em>know<\/em> I have 4 users logged into my machine. They are all me, logged in as different accounts, sitting idle. There look, I&#8217;ve logged out of all but one.  That should clear up some of the RAM I am not running out of.<\/p>\n<p>Please locate the problem user.<\/p>\n<p>No, it isn&#8217;t me.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, I <em>know<\/em> my big process sometimes wakes up and consumes some CPU. That&#8217;s why I want you to fix the problem; so it is very responsive when it does. But it doesn&#8217;t wake up often, and when it does, it doesn&#8217;t do it for long. Seriously, it accounts for a couple of percent of CPU over a 5 minute period. It doesn&#8217;t explain why the 15-minute average system load is about 500% higher than it normally is.<\/p>\n<p>Please locate the problem user.<\/p>\n<p>No, it isn&#8217;t me.<\/p>\n<p>Oh look, after spending 30 minutes trying to prove it isn&#8217;t me, the problem went away. Either the user fixed their own problem or maybe you did and didn&#8217;t want to tell me.<\/p>\n<p>No, it wasn&#8217;t me.<\/p>\n<p>Sigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A whinge about my server host.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,24,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-based-on-a-true-story","category-cathartic-rant","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1469"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1473,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1469\/revisions\/1473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}